fast car - smallestchurch - Our Flag Means Death (TV) [Archive of Our Own] (2024)

Chapter 1: got nothing to lose

Chapter Text

YEAR ONE

- SEPTEMBER -

“So. Why the f*ck does someone like you have a job in a sh*thole like this?”

Stede knew the question would come eventually, but that doesn’t take the sting of shame out of it.

“You’ve heard of me?” He winces as he asks.

“Oh yeah, I’ve heard of you. I’ve heard all about you,” Ed says.

Ed, his trainer here on his second shift at Minty’s, is a wiry, wild-haired kid with a patchy beard situation he seems to be trying out. It’s awful and yet somehow it suits him perfectly, highlights the impossible angle of his jaw.

When he’d approached Stede, hand out in greeting, to explain he would be Stede’s trainer, Stede almost fainted dead away in the middle of the dining room. He’d thought only losers worked here. Losers like him.

Ed is not a loser. He is one grade below Stede and is so cool that even someone like Stede knows who he is without introduction. Teachers love him and other kids love him and girls? Even Stede’s heard about the bathroom graffiti. It’s understandable because even with the questionable beard, he has a dark, alien beauty to him, Stede thinks, now that he’s had some time up close. Something about the eyes. He can’t stop looking at his eyes. And then he feels self-conscious about how much time he spends looking at his eyes, and then he has to stare at the ground for a long time.

“So,” Ed says, refusing to let it drop, “lay it on me. Why the hell are you here?”

“Same as you, really?”

Ed’s laugh is immediate, unselfconscious, and devastating. What Stede would give to express himself so freely.

“No f*ckin’ way, mate,” Ed says. He stops wiping down the counter entirely, flings the rag down as though to make a point. “YOU come from f*ck you money.”

“Yes, but—”

“YOU wear f*ckin’ shirts that cost as much as my mom’s car.”

“Well, that’s not quite—”

“YOU probably say words like cashmere, and, I dunno, tureen every day. YOU belong in our school. I come from a sh*tty feeder district on the other side of the highway that’s too poor to have its own high school. So lemme ask you again. What are you doing here?”

“Probably studying the poors to write a college entrance essay about us or something,” Jim says from their post in the drive-thru window.

“Make such sh*t money he probably counts it as volunteer hours,” John says from the break room, half-reclined on two retired dining room chairs.

“His dad probably owns the place and he’s spying to know who to fire first,” Roach says from his post at the grill.

“Am I paying you lot to talk? Is this a f*ckin’ public speaking course?” Hornigold’s head peeks sideways out of the manager’s office door. It’s not a question. Everyone mutters, returning to their tasks.

“Empty f*ckin’ shirt,” Ed says.

“Why do you work here, Ed?” Stede says quietly. Ed is showing him how to drain the milkshake machine to clean all the bits inside. The whole corner smells like old milk.

Ed scoffs, pulls a face. “Money, mate. Only place in town you can work under 18.”

“And why do you need money?”

“Okay, I know you’re rich, but even for you, that’s a stupid f*ckin’ question.“

“I’m serious,” Stede says. Forces himself to look right at him to prove it. “Please.”

Ed eyes him warily. For a second Stede thinks he won’t answer. Stede doesn’t understand how to do this, how to relate to people, how to get close to them without leaving himself vulnerable. He thought maybe with time and proximity he would figure it out, that the world of friends and laughs and stories for which one had to be there would simply reveal itself. But it’s his second shift, and the first time Ed’s talking to him about anything but the tasks at hand is to point out how different they would always be.

Perhaps, Stede thinks, it’s best to keep his mouth shut. He shakes his head, turns his attention back to his task, begins scrubbing out the machine. That’s what everyone wants him to do, show up, do the work, stay quiet about his fancy life, go home—

“Freedom.”

Ed is carefully focused on a piece of stainless steel in his hands as though it asked him the question. He turns it slowly in his long nimble fingers, like it’s precious, delicate, valuable.

“It’s, you know. If I save up enough money, maybe I can get a car. If I can get a car, and it’s fast enough, maybe I can get the f*ck away from here.”

Ed lifts a shoulder, drops it, goes back to normal speed. And this is it, Stede thinks. He can choose to let Ed hold that alone, hide his shame, or—

Would Ed even believe him if he told the truth?

“Same,” Stede says softly, heart racing.

Ed’s head whips in his direction. “What?”

“My dad, you know, he’s, um…”

Stede is shocked to find tears pricking his eyes, right there amid the garish fluorescents and scratchy uniforms and stale milk smells.

He wants to say it all: how his mother’s enthusiasm for pills has single-handedly paid for several pharmaceutical executives’ yachts, how he is an only child who went through such intense bullying that the only mammal he trusts is Arthur his horse, how he rides the bus here to Minty’s, forty-five minutes each way because he will never ask his father for anything—how he had to learn how to ride the bus just for this. That he, too, wants to save enough cash to get a car and get the hell out of here, anywhere far away enough to count as somewhere else. That he wants to do it on his own so that the debt of his existence is washed, that he is going to secret all his money away somewhere his father can’t find it, won’t know about it, can’t take it from him or bully him for the choices he made to acquire it, wants to say that when he falls asleep at night he dreams about the look on his father’s face when he finally realizes his only son has left for good, all without taking one bloody dollar from him to do it, and that he will die alone and rich and angry and alone.

The words are stuck, though. They’re in public, sure, and at work at that. But also, when this shift is over Stede will go home to a big house and a warm bed and whatever he wants to eat, and, yes, okay, a horse. What does Ed go home to? He wonders. Ed’s charming and popular, but he also cuts class like he’s majoring in it, and he once had quite the penchant for getting suspended for fighting. He eats his free Minty’s shift meal like it’s the only food he’s seen in a week. And for all his easy smiles, Ed’s got something behind his big warm eyes, a sadness Stede wouldn’t dare try to reach.

“Cruel. He’s … he’s cruel.”

“He know you’re working here?” Ed asks knowingly.

“No, he, erm. He does not. No.” Because if he did he would immediately demand that Stede quit, or worse, storm in and quit on his behalf while threatening a lawsuit for good measure.

“And you’re one year ahead of me, yeah? You’re done after this year?”

“Mm, yes,” Stede says with a noxious swirl of dread. “Class of ’99, I suppose.”

He stares at his feet. The party that will be thrown for him, attended almost entirely by people he doesn’t know, his mother swigging champagne and slurring about how proud she is. The universities he will be expected to attend, the Empty Shirt social circles he will be expected to move in, the predetermined career he will be sewn into like an exquisitely tailored straight jacket.

Eight months away, and rushing toward him like a tunnel painted on a brick wall.

“Well, we’d better finish getting you trained on all of this sh*t,” Ed says with a wink, clapping his hand to Stede’s shoulder. “Then you can take more shifts. Sounds like you’ll need ‘em.”

- DECEMBER -

“Tell you a secret,” Ed says, exhaling cigarette smoke politely over his far shoulder.

They’re sitting on the bench downtown, watching the dinner rush blow through the drive through from across the four-lane expanse of state route 27. They’re staring at the other Minty’s location, the nicer one by their school, closer to Stede’s turf. The one that had declined to hire either of them.

This is the Minty’s everyone wishes they worked at. It’s newer and cleaner. The clientele are families, instead of burn-outs who try to trick you into giving them their food before they’ve paid so they can speed away laughing. Nobody at this Minty’s would dare change the marquee out front to say, “NOW HIRING: PULL AND FART TIME.” All the kids Stede would expect to work at the better location are precisely the ones who work at the better location. They’re all rich and clean-cut and popular and he hates absolutely every one of them.

Stede, of course, did not make the Good Minty’s cut. He possesses all the requisite characteristics except being well-liked, which it turned out was the most important one. It’s fine—he didn’t want to work with Nigel and Chauncey anyhow.

And if he had gotten that gig, he wouldn’t have met Ed.

At first, Ed didn’t understand. For the first couple of weeks, he gave Stede a near-endless stream of sh*t for “lowering himself” to their side of the world. In case that was shocking to you, that’s what a person who works for a living looks like, Ed had quipped when a dirt-streaked man in a bright orange vest had left with his milkshake. I know you think floors mop themselves, but here we do it with our hands, Ed had said the first time Stede had forgotten that task on the list of closing duties.

All that had changed, though. One Monday, Stede had opened his locker to discover its entire contents trapped beneath a hard-cured shell of glue, all his books, his calculator, his gym shoes—ruined. Even when he kept his head down, they found a way to step on it. He’d slammed the door feeling lost and desperate, like a pigeon trapped inside the mall.

When a hand landed on his shoulder he’d almost jumped out of his skin.

Assholes, Ed had muttered, patting Stede’s shoulder fondly. He’d shaken his head and left, and after that, the jokes stopped.

It’s a chilly night, but Ed always looks like a warm summer day. He’s got a leg slung over the arm of the bench, one arm hanging loose over the back of it. He has a way of taking up space without being obnoxious about it. He can sprawl all he likes and never be in someone’s way. No matter how small Stede makes himself, it seems there’s always someone to apologize to.

Ed’s in his leather jacket. Stede thinks there’s probably no better smell in the whole world than Ed’s leather jacket, the amalgamated smells of his (best?) friend, his cigarettes, that drug store stuff he puts in his hair, that spicy cologne that smells like the mall, the lingering sweet grease smell of the vats at work.

The headset dangles from Ed’s right hand, out there in the open, like he doesn’t even care if anyone sees it.

Maybe he doesn’t, Stede thinks. After all, what does he have to lose?

Come to that, what does Stede have to lose? Only the things he’s trying to outrun anyway.

Tell you a secret. Stede’s learned that everything with him is goofs and laughs, sarcasm and shenanigans—unless he says tell you a secret. Last time, they were sitting on a bench in town during lunch, watching leaves fall lazy from the trees as Ed flipped idly through some glossy oversaturated music magazine. Stede had asked how Ed ALWAYS managed to get free chips with his bagel.

Tell you a secret, he’d said. People don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves. They wear their STORIES on their sleeves.

Sure, his dad was a drunk mean f*ck. Sure, his mom drank too, when she found time to in the middle of working herself to death to support them. Sure, sometimes he thought about killing his f*ckin’ dad to save them both.

But in the real world, he’d said, the only sh*t people care about is a bad attitude. So he’d changed his story. Changed what he wore on his sleeve. It kept nosy teachers from ordering a check on his apartment, it kept Minty’s customers from complaining about his half-assed customer service, and yeah, it got him free lunch from the bagel counter when he didn’t have any other way to pay for it.

You, man, you show everything on your face. You gotta change it on the inside first. You gotta talk to everyone like they just handed you fifty bucks and a puppy. Or, I guess, to you, five thousand bucks and a leopard.

A leopard?

Yeah, you know, like those two weirdos in Vegas.

That’s a tiger, Ed.

Yeah, great, one of those. Point is, you can’t let anyone see you sweat.

Then he’d winked like a gameshow host, like the most clever guy alive, but Stede had felt sad all the way down to his shoes.

He’d been to Ed’s briefly. Ed acted normal, but Stede saw. He saw the bottles in the overfull trash, smelled last night’s microwave dinner on the counter. He saw the baseball bat hidden under Ed’s bed.

If Ed could change that story, then Stede could change his. Now, he gets up in the morning, he looks in the mirror, and he says: I am going to buy a car, and I am going to save him, and every day I am getting closer to it.

I’m going to save him. I’m going to save him.

One by one, the lights in the Minty’s parking lot blink on in the dim. The story has him grinning from the inside out, and Ed’s going to tell him another secret.

“Shoot,” Stede says.

“I made them let me train you on your first day.”

Stede laughs. The permanent knot in his guts starts doing backflips. “You’re kidding.”

“Nah. John was supposed to. I changed the schedule so I could do it instead.”

“Why?”

“Dunno,” he says. “Something about you. Weirdly fascinated by your … whole thing. Pressed creases in the Minty’s-issue uniform pants. Actual tie from home. Hands shaking, staring at your shoes. You looked like a good time. And I was right. I’m always right.”

A good time, Stede thinks. The first part was a ribbing, sure, but it’s fine. When Ed ribs him, it feels like an invitation instead of a rejection.

And anyway, he’s not sure even his horse would describe him as a good time.

“Oh, well, that’s—that, I—”

“sh*t, here we go. f*ckery time.”

The last car pulls away from the drive-thru. The dining room is empty, save an older couple in the back corner, napkins spread across their laps like they’re at a real restaurant.

It’s a Thursday night, heightening the illicitness somehow. The fog rolls in, right on cue, as though Ed planned it that way. The parking lot lights cast acrid yellow cones on the asphalt. It’s silent, except for the hum of the HVAC. Stede has the distinct feeling of something being slightly off, like they’re trapped inside an Edward Hopper painting making some point about loneliness in suburban America.

Ed slips the drive-thru headset over his hair. It’s big and wild and he has to extend the little bar to make it fit. He probably has to do it every time he wears it. Stede finds himself filing this away in the shoebox in his chest where he keeps every fact he learns about Ed. He asked to train me. His hair is too big for the drive-thru headset. He is saving to buy a car. His favorite car is a Corvette. He goes to Poetry Club but only submits anonymously. His cigarette brand is American Spirit.

“Are you sure this will work?” Stede says, opening the release valve just a touch to let some of the nerves escape.

“Yeah, sure. Ours went down last year and we had to borrow some from these guys, they’re exactly the same. Trust me.”

Ed presses the button on the pack in his lap to turn the headset on.

“Hello? Hello, excuse me? Can anyone hear me?”

Ed gestures for Stede to lean in to listen. Stede can feel Ed’s hair touch his own. The reply is tinny but definitely comes from inside Minty’s.

“Who said that?”

Stede can see them inside the brightly lit space, giving each other looks, pointing, peeking around corners. He knows them all, and well enough to tell them apart at this distance. Except the twins, they’re harder to nail down. Stede’s pretty sure he’s looking at Nigel—the crueler one.

“I’m—I’m not sure, honestly,” Ed says, making his voice sound scared. “I just sort of. Appeared? It’s bright here, and I can’t see anyone, but I can hear you all talking. About hamburgers. Why are you all talking about hamburgers? Am I dead?”

“Is this Mark? It’s gotta be right, he’s gotta be in the walk-in or something,” the headset voice says.

“Who’s Mark, oh, god, am I the ghost of Mark?” Ed pretends to panic. Stede watches as they rush to the back of the building to check the walk-in for Mark. They check the closets, the office. Stede feels a wild mania blooming in his chest and has to hold himself back from hysterical laughter.

“Mark come on, man, where are you, you’re being a dick.”

Ed goes to respond but has to pause to compose himself. His face is all scrunched up and he’s got his fingers pressed to his eyeballs and Stede feels something break inside his heart, some cluster of loneliness vibrated apart by the rumble of Ed’s laughter. It’s full dark now, and for all Stede knows, Ed’s the only person in the world.

He never thought having a friend could feel like this.

“I feel … I feel like I’m looking down on you from above,” Ed says, holding back a laugh for all he’s worth.

Across the way, they’re scrambling now, looking inside cabinets, the restrooms, under the register counters. One brave soul opens the door and scans the parking lot, and in the well-lit doorway, Stede’s sure it’s Nigel—longer hair sticking out from under the hat, no birthmark.

“Oh, god, will they see us?” Stede whispers.

“No way, man, it’s too dark, we’re too far away.”

They rush back inside to have some sort of a conference. One of them is pointing at the ceiling, saying something angrily, gesturing wildly.

“Are you coming?” Ed asks. “Are you coming to get me?”

One by one, they climb shakily up the ladder to the roof. The latch opens with a thud that echoes across the street. Stede watches four heads emerge, one after the other, peering to dark corners, finding nothing.

“Okay, what’s our exit strategy here,” Ed whispers. “Gotta stick this landing, help me out.”

Nigel laughs, and Stede can feel the sound bounce off him. Last week, Nigel hit him in the face with a volleyball in gym. It was obviously on purpose, and the teacher obviously saw it. When Stede met the teacher’s eye, he looked away and blew the whistle, told everyone to get changed. It had left a bruise for days.

The fresh indignity of it washes over him. If he had teeth, he would bare them. There are mats in his fur. He wants blood on his chin.

He sits up straight.

“Nigel,” Stede says.

“What?”

“Nigel, tell them…tell them Nigel has to repent. Has to—has to change his ways.”

“Mate, I don’t talk like that.”

“Okay, well, make it sound like Mark the Ghost, or, or channel Charles Dickens or something! Do it, now, Ed, before they go down, I want him SCARED.”

“Okay okay,” Ed says, eyes big. He fumbles to get the headset into position. He sits up straighter.

“Nigel,” Ed says into the mouthpiece. “Nigel, Nigel Nigel Nigel, this … this name it’s … being spoken to me.”

The kid with the headset turns, takes the headset off, unclips the battery pack from his waist, stunned. He says something, probably he’s talking about you, and Nigel takes the headset.

“Nigel? Nigel? Who is Nigel?” Ed’s muttering deliriously. “Am I Nigel?”

“I’M NIGEL, NIGEL IS SPEAKING.” Nigel’s voice is high and panicked, and Stede puffs his chest out. He’s never felt more powerful.

“I’m here to warn you, Nigel,” Ed says, letting his voice drop into what Stede thinks of as the growl register.

“Warn me? O-of what, that’s ridiculous, this is absurd, I demand to know who is speaking.”

Ed huffs a laugh, looks at Stede like, can you believe this f*ckin’ guy?

“You don’t demand sh*t right now, pal. See that light? Yep, that one. By the edge of the roof, there. I want you to step into that light, Nigel. Come on, right now. Let’s go, you can do it.”

Looking wildly around, Nigel steps rigidly into the beam of light, eyes like dinner plates, mouth agog.

“There’s a good lad,” Ed coos into the headset.

Stede’s entranced. A jolt of wild power surges through him. There he is, the boy he’s been terrified of since the first day he stepped foot in this school, stripped of all his potency by Ed’s disembodied voice, obeying complacently like the daddy’s boy he’s always been.

“Tell him you know about the rowboat,” Stede whispers.

“The what?”

“In grade school. He gagged me and tied me to a row boat and pushed me out, threw rocks at me.”

“Good god, mate,” Ed says. His features warp into something stuffed with rage and disgust and more than a little pity. It makes Stede want to dart into oncoming traffic.

“Now I want you to listen to me, Nigel,” Ed says, getting back into it, conversational, cool, pausing to let a car pass, “I want you to know that I’m keeping score. Every bad thing you do, every single one, from cheating on tests to stealing from lockers to thinking about your cousin’s tit* while you jerk off, all of it.”

“How DARE you, I will find out who you are and I will—”

“Tying people to rowboats, Nigel?”

Silence, save the distant roar of the highway. The fight drains out of Nigel. Stede watches it happen. He sits up straighter.

“That’s right, f*cker. I know all about the rowboat, you mean, smug bastard, I see you, I see straight into that rotting bilge pump you call a heart, and I don’t forgive you. The greatest kindness I could do for this world would be to make you walk right off the edge of that roof there, but! Lucky for you I’m in a good mood so I’ll say this: it’s time to change or die, Nigel. It’s time to be a better f*ckin’ person out here. Understand? Every time you think about being a dick to someone who doesn’t deserve it, I’ll know, and you’ll look over your shoulder or around the corner or under your f*ckin’ bed, and you’ll never see me—but I’ll know, and you’ll know I know. So let’s make sure we don’t have this chat again, yeah? Because there WILL be consequences. I assure you.”

Ed clicks the thing off, shakes his head. Nigel’s shouting something at the headset but Stede can only hear the angry shape of it at this distance. Stede’s heart races.

“Ed,” he says, voice all breathy. “That was magnificent.”

“I know,” Ed says.

They watch, riveted, as they climb one by one back down the ladder, Nigel going last, shaking his head and spluttering angrily. Halfway down the ladder, he stops to rant about something, taking one hand off the ladder. It’s not far to the ground, but he goes down hard and manages to land, somehow, face down on the headset.

"Looks like a f*ckin' consequence to me," Ed says to Stede.

When he gets up, he’s got a hand over his right eye and he’s screaming bloody murder.

“Oh, god, is he hurt?”

“Eh, if he’s screaming like that, he’ll be alright,” Ed says. “Come on, let’s go get something to eat.”

When he stands, the world doesn’t move. It stays there, on that bench, for a long time.

The first time Stede told his father he was being bullied, his father said it was his fault for not knowing how to throw a proper punch.

The time he came home with a split lip, his father laughed, told him it would build character.

The time he came home with a black eye, his father only shook his head and left the room.

But Ed helped him. Ed believed him.

At the diner down the street, over fries and coffee, he can’t stop staring at Ed. Ed asks why Nigel hates him and Stede says Nigel’s mad because in ancient times he’d be revered as a godlike figure due to the sheer size of his head, and Ed laughs and laughs, hand on his stomach, food in his open mouth, and it feels like the first major chord of Stede’s life.

On Friday, Nigel is absent. On Monday, Nigel is at his locker, a few down from where Stede is sticking the stems of the wildflowers he picked on his walk to school through the slots in Ed’s locker.

He wears an eye patch. He stiffly asks Stede how his weekend was, and Stede can’t answer for thirty seconds.

He’d spent the whole weekend with Ed.

“Well it was … lovely,” he says, eventually.

- MARCH -

“Please explain to me,” his father growls the second they’re out of earshot of the back door of the restaurant, “just what the hell you think you’re playing at, BOY?”

“Father, I am eighteen years old and if I want to work at a fast food restaurant, I will work at a fast food restaurant,” Stede says.

He has never spoken to his father this way.

But Stede had changed his story.

Over the past six months, he had felt vague, blurry instinct calcify into iron determination.

It started with the job, sure. It was a rebellion to take the gig, and he knew it. He had assumed he wouldn’t last, or that he would be bullied out of it, or be incapable of performing the expected tasks. And that might have been true—but only at first. Ed was a good trainer, always willing to answer questions even after Stede was on his own. Over time, with practice, he found he was good at the work. Efficient, forward-thinking. Often commended for seeing things others missed.

The customers liked him well enough. The moms flirted, and the kids giggled. On rare occasions, the dads winked, which was fascinating. Sure, he’d had rocky moments—dropping things, forgetting things, one particularly embarrassing moment of making fun of a customer’s sunglasses to Ed only to turn around and see the drive-thru window still wide open and the person staring, open-mouthed—but on the whole, he was as competent as anyone there. An impressive feat, considering his father had always insisted he’d never last a day in the so-called real world.

At work, he often spent a whole shift not feeling insufficiently competent or masculine or ambitious and that’s more than he could say for any time he spent in his father’s company. At work, they laughed. They had inside jokes, and indignities they’d all suffered together, like the lady who threw a 32oz co*ke through the drive-through window for the simple fact of it not being root beer. The whole place smelled sickly sweet all night. As they mopped and mopped, they cycled through impressions of her demonic screech, trying to crack each other up.

He was making friends. Or, friend, singular. Jury was still out on the rest of the crew. But he had Ed, and hardly an hour went by when he wasn’t grateful for that.

All of it had changed him so much in such a short period of time that this man talking to him—talking down to him—felt like a stranger. A person who only bothered care about Stede’s life when he felt like telling him he was doing it all wrong, and he’d known as soon as he’d seen his father’s shiny black Denali pull into the Minty’s parking lot that he was done putting up with all that for good.

They’d locked eyes through the wall of glass Stede had been dutifully wiping down, and Stede hadn’t even felt fear, not at first. No shame, either. Only a bone-deep weariness that he’d have to discuss it with him at all.

“My god, this uniform, this, these grease stains … this is so far beneath us as to be practically subterranean!”

“I’m still getting good marks. I’ve sent in the college applications.”

A lie. Two, actually.

“Answer the question. Now.”

“Well. It’s just that I’d been, erm. Thinking that perhaps someday I might like to invest in restaurants. This is relevant experience,” he lies lazily, again, lacking the energy or enthusiasm to properly sell it.

There is a flash of fury on his father’s face before he seemingly remembers they’re in public and schools it into something like silent disgust.

“Restaurants.”

“Yes, I think that—”

“Nonsense.”

“Fine,” Stede says, rolling his eyes.

“You’re out of your mind,” his father says, stepping in closer. “You’re nothing but a weak-hearted, soft-handed—”

“Yes, yes, I know, lily livered little rich boy. Must we do this? I’m needed inside.”

“Just who the hell do you think you are?” The rage bursts out of him like a rocket. Spittle lands on Stede’s face, and it takes all his strength not to recoil. “You think I don’t know anything, but I do. I know exactly what you’re doing, trying to humiliate me with this pathetic performance? You just wait, Stede Bonnet, soon you’ll realize being poor in this world isn’t dignified or righteous, it’s humiliation after humiliation, it’s a series of punishments from which I’m trying to spare you. But no, you’d prefer to do it your way, end up on a street corner somewhere. Mark my words: the instant you can’t handle it, you’ll come running back here, begging for your destiny: a soft, easy future provided TO you BY me.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Don’t test me, BOY.”

“Father,” Stede says, and hesitates. Just for an instant, just to be sure it’s true.

He realizes: six months ago, Stede would have hidden in the walk-in until his father left. This time, he’d marched straight out into the parking lot to kindly request he f*ck off.

It occurs to him that it’s his father who would never last a second in this world. One indignity of the kind they all suffered hourly would fell him like a mighty giant of folklore. He would go down red-faced and spluttering while everyone laughed.

The story has changed.

Stede leans in toward his father. He practically whispers.

“I’m not afraid of you anymore.”

His father’s eyes go big, his mouth drops open, red blooms across his face, mean as a forest fire.

“Okay,” his father says. “We’ll do it your way.”

He stalks back to his car grumbling and Stede’s body shakes with unspent rage.

The dinner rush ebbs and it’s two hours until closing. The rain beats against the windows, and that means the rest of the night will be a crawl. A soaked mom and exhausted kid coming back from a late dance recital, a handful of hungry stoners, maybe some miserable soul in scrubs, and then lights out. The mid-shift folks have left for the night, so it’s just him and Ed now, plodding through closing duties ahead of time so that the minute that OPEN sign turns over, they’re gone. Stede’s grateful for the quiet and the chance to do some mindless tasks, burn some of the fury off.

“Here. Dr. Pepper’s orders.”

Ed approaches with two lidless brim-full Minty’s cups and hands one to Stede. The cup feels structurally unsound in his hand without the lid, like the force of Stede’s anger alone might crush it. Ed touches it carefully against Stede’s, pinky out, an approximation of cheers, and the gesture feels strangely grown-up. Stede takes a sip and almost spits it across the room.

Ed winks. He pulls a small half-empty bottle of rum from his back pocket, wiggles it around. “Thought maybe you could use a little pick-me-up.”

“Where did you get this?”

“The guy at the convenience store on the corner. We’re pals.”

“That huge scary guy?”

“Steak Knife, yeah. Sweet as f*ckin’ pie, actually. I sneak him dinner when it’s slow, and, well,” Ed shrugs, like it’s that easy to charm his way through the world.

“But that’s illegal,” Stede blurts, and immediately wishes he could turn into a crustacean.

Ed laughs. “Yeah, mate. Sure is.” He takes another big swig.

Stede can feel that first hit absorb into his system. He’s snuck the odd drink at home before—after all, his mother’s personal arsenal is so vast she’d never notice the occasional missing splash of vodka—but he’d never done this in public, in such garish lighting, while he’s supposed to be working and serving customers and—

“Hey. This isn’t a panic moment, okay?” Ed’s hand is warm on his shoulder. It skates down his back and he tries to stop himself from shivering. “Not enough in there to do any real damage. Just … I know that prick ruined your day.”

He’d told Ed what had happened, squished into the back corner of the freezer where nobody could find them, sitting on a case of chicken patty bricks.

Jesus mate, he really says ‘lily-livered?’

I know. Like it’s the goddamn seventeen hundreds or something.

Stede’s whole body had been shaking, from the cold and from the anger. His teeth rattled violently.

I’m leaving too, Ed. You and me, we’re gonna get out of here together.

Hey, Ed had said, smile beating back the cold, let’s just get through this dinner rush and figure all that out later.

“Also, you know,” Ed says, suddenly so shy he might as well be twisting his toe around in the dirt, “I’m trying to be a decent friend. Sort of, uhh. Don’t have any of those, these days.”

Stede opens his mouth to argue, but then he thinks: Ed’s telling the truth. He’s popular, sure, everyone likes him. But it’s Stede he spends all his time with. It’s Stede who gets to see past the stories he wears around.

Because they’re friends. Best friends.

At school, Stede thinks, he always felt like he was supposed to be less. At home, he always felt like he was supposed to be more.

With Ed, he feels precisely like himself.

I love him, Stede thinks for the very first time. He doesn’t know what it means, or what to do with it yet, but he knows it’s true.

“To new adventures,” Stede says, and gulps down half his cup.

“That’s the f*ckin’ spirit!” Ed shouts. “To new adventures.”

An hour later and he is warm and the passing headlights glitter through rain on the big windows and everything is so funny. There’s a swig of rum left and they’re saving it for closing. They’ve still got an hour to go and Stede can count six fireable offenses between them, which he knows because he actually read the handbook. The first two are that they are decidedly tipsy on the clock. Also (3) Ed is making French toast on the burger grill using the weird crustless middle buns from the #1 meal, dousing them in syrup packets and (4) eating them right there in the kitchen. Stede is (5) eating them, too, and they taste so good that he is moaning his delight (6) from his spot perched on the counter, feet swinging.

The headset sitting next to him which he is not wearing (okay, make that seven fireable offenses) buzzes.

“sh*t, f*ck,” Ed giggles. He starts scraping everything to the side, racing to clean the grill to fill the impending order.

“Hello, uhh, welcome to Minty’s,” Stede stammers into the headset, quickly re-buttoning the collar on his uniform and heading to the till. He has to ask them to turn down the Sugar Ray song so he can hear their order.

It’s a carload, which means Stede has to take the order and then bolt back to the grill to help Ed make sandwiches, because they haven’t exactly been keeping the kitchen stocked to protocol. For a solid three minutes, it’s uncoordinated chaos, shredded lettuce flying everywhere as Stede tears open a new bag, Ed scrambling to refill the sauce gun which they’d already cleaned for the night. Pickles are friends, not lovers, Ed chides at his shoulder as Stede hastily builds two burgers, slopping big piles of them in the middles. He sticks his tongue out in response, a bratty, juvenile exercise he’s never done in his life but which makes him feel giddy and young.

Stede hands the order through and slams the window shut, slumps against the ledge. The Altima speeds off and Every Morning fades with it, thank god. His heart is pounding. The adrenaline courses through him, arguing with the liquor. He can feel sweat on his forehead. He is alive, he realizes, as though that is new information. He is alive and he is a little drunk and he is alone in this big place with his best friend and they can’t stop laughing and a year ago he would not believe this version of him could exist.

Ed comes around the corner, left hand on his hip. In his right is the sauce gun, raised above his shoulder, orange goo oozing from the tip.

“Did we do it? Are we free?”

“Yes. Next time I vote we kill the lights, pretend we’re not here.”

“Paint the whole outside of the building to look like the parking lot,” Ed says.

“Ooh, another f*ckery!”

Ed grins, pretending to co*ck the sauce gun like a rifle.

“Don’t get any ideas with that,” Stede says.

He understands instantly that he has said the wrong thing.

“Ed. Ed no,” he says, snaking his way out of the drive through nook, hands up in surrender.

But Ed keeps coming, gun pointed like he’s starring in a tacky cop show, pretending to clear the rooms.

“Ed, be serious, we’ll have to clean, it’ll stain, you can’t—hey!”

Ed’s making a mock war face, advancing with intent. Stede breaks off, turns, bolts for the office, shoes squeaking against the tile, but he can’t get there fast enough to lock Ed out. There’s a struggle at the door, Stede using all his strength to keep Ed out, but somehow he’s stronger, and there he is, the door slams open against the wall, knocks the calendar off, it goes fluttering to the floor.

“Time to meet your sandwich maker, Stede,” he says, and—

“Sandwich maker?” It makes him laugh so hard he can barely get through it. “You—you been sitting on that?”

“Laugh all you like,” Ed says, Terminator voice, advancing, giggling. “Prepare to fry.”

He gets Stede’s wrist in his grip, squeezing hard, it hurts even through the rum fog and the laughter, and Stede feels it zing up his spine into his scalp.

Ed keeps coming, and the space is the size of two phone booths, there is nowhere to go. He is backed against the desk, Ed between his legs. He looks wildly around for some implement of defense. He grabs a stapler, flicks it open, starts firing stray staples into the air, saying Ed, Ed no, over and over. Ed gets the sauce gun hand up to block him, forearm to forearm, staples landing in Ed’s hair. The other hand lets go of Stede’s wrist and lands on his thigh as Ed careens forward, losing his balance. The laughter has tipped into pain, Ed can’t even get words out, and then—

And then Stede realizes Ed’s leaned in so close he can smell the rum on his breath, the sweat in his uniform, can see the stars in his eyes. He is close enough he could nuzzle the stubble on Ed’s cheek. And Ed’s laughter has changed, it’s not laughter anymore, it’s breathing, heavy breathing, and he’s so close, he’s—

A portal opens in Stede’s mind. This portal has opened before, and every time, he turns his back to it. It’s closer now, though, he can hear it hum. And he is safer with Ed. Cautiously, he walks into it. The walls pulse with rum and adrenaline. At the end of it, a chair, a desk. He sits on the desk and Ed stands between his legs. Ed presses his body against him, there in the office, an eighth fireable offense, and the portal hums louder. Ed’s mouth is soft and serious. There is no sauce gun in the portal—the portal has no use for flimsy pretenses—so Ed gets one hand at the dip in Stede’s waist, pulling him closer, arching his spine. The rain roars against the portal. Ed’s other hand is pulling Stede's leg up around his waist. Ed’s stubble scratches his chin and Ed’s tongue tastes like rum and Stede melts like sugar, Stede is made of sounds, Stede is free. Minty’s disappears and the office door slams shut and there is only one chair, Ed in Stede’s lap, pressed chest to chest, writhing, breathing—

Outside the portal, Ed is still, eyes like galaxies. The grip on Stede’s thigh hasn’t loosened—he can feel each individual fingertip. Stede’s heart skitters into a rhythm reserved for ground-dwelling pray animals hunted by cats, and Stede thinks maybe this is real, maybe the portal is real, realer than life, maybe all he has to do is—

The headset hanging around his neck beeps. Stede blinks back into the present.

“I should,” Stede says, clears his throat. “We should, erm—”

“Yeah,” Ed says, stepping back.

A second hangs between them, glistens like a spiderweb in the morning. The sauce gun is at Ed’s side and his chest heaves up and down and his eyes are so big they might swallow him whole. Stede cannot take a full inhale because something is crushing his ribs down against his lungs.

He can’t do this. Not here, not with Ed, no, no no no no no—it’s madness, he’s not like that, they’re not, it’s—

“Hello,” a voice in the headset calls. Show me love, show me life, the car radio declares, tinny and thin. “Are you open?”

“Hello, Bonnet household,” Stede says into the headset, and whatever tension there was evaporates as Ed doubles over again in a fit of laughter.

“f*ck, Ed would you—I mean, good evening welcome to Minty’s!”

- JUNE -

Stede is pacing. They’re at Ed’s. They hang out mostly at Ed’s place, despite the startling lack of amenities (even the toilet requires a trick to flush it), because nobody seems to ever be there but Ed. His mother cleans houses and picks up shifts at 24-hour laundromat, and Ed’s Dad disappears for weeks sometimes like an aloof outdoor cat that is also very drunk. So Stede goes there. Sometimes for days. Sleeps on the floor in a pile of blankets that don’t keep him warm enough. They talk until it’s way too late, eat chips out of crinkly bags. He wakes up in a room that smells like Ed.

The room that smells like Ed is tiny with one window that looks out to the street, propped open with a piece of wood, with blinds that hang in a distorted triangle. There are band posters tacked or taped haphazardly to the walls (more than one covering suspiciously fist-sized holes). There is a stereo with a tape player but a broken CD player sitting on a dresser with one crooked drawer that doesn’t close. The carpet is beige with miscellaneous stains, and the walls are a pale spring yellow that clashes drastically with the overall mood. There is a desk piled with school stuff. Before it sits a chipped red vinyl chair that looks like it came from a diner.

Stede wishes he had the ability to not notice any of that, because whenever he does he feels like the kind of rich asshole everyone loves to accuse him of being. It’s less that he cares that Ed is poor and more that Ed deserves a goddamn dresser that works properly and Stede wants to find the grown-ups responsible for this injustice and run them over with the car he is inching ever closer to being able to purchase. He wants to give Ed a world where he can buy a new dresser if he so much as decides he no longer enjoys the color.

Despite all that, Ed’s room is, perhaps, the only place in the world where Stede doesn’t feel afraid.

Ed’s on the edge of the bed, across the room, red flannel blanket messy around him, pillows askew. His eyes are big—they change size in direct proportion to how big the thing is he’s feeling. His knee jiggles. His feet are bare, skinny ankles sticking out of his jeans.

Stede’s graduation is tomorrow. Ed’s is one year away.

It’s funny, Stede thinks. It always seemed impossibly distant. And then, all of a sudden: graduation is tomorrow.

“Will they be there?”

“Wouldn’t I like to know,” Stede scoffs. “He’s still not speaking to me.”

“Still? Jesus, mate, it’s been months. Me and my old man would have had thirty fights by now.”

“That is not the Bonnet way. I don’t think my parents have talked to each other in five years, not since he caught my mother having,” air quotes, “lunch with her chiropractor.”

Stede sits on the floor, back to the bed, head in his hands. Ed’s hand lands warm and solid on his shoulder and he pretends not to notice what happens inside.

“I think he still thinks I’m going to college, Ed. I didn’t send in a single application. At some point he’s going to realize I’m just working at Minty’s full time and kick me out, and I don’t have enough saved yet. Rent around here is insane, I’d need a second job, or a, a roommate, or—“

Ed doesn’t take the bait.

“Deep breath,” Ed says. “Come on. Plan hasn’t changed, man. You work, you save, you go. You can still do it. Everything’s fine. And listen, you know, if you did change your mind, and you want to go to college, that’s … ya know, that’s okay, man. It’s your life.”

What’s all this YOU, Stede thinks.

“Absolutely not. I said I’d wait for you, and I’m waiting, Ed. I just wish I didn’t have to LIVE there, you know? With all that poisonous resentment everywhere, all those empty rooms. Maybe … maybe if we pooled our—”

“Can’t leave mom, mate.”

“I know.”

“She needs me. She’s trying really hard, man. Drinking less, saving money, figuring out how to get out of here, and by next year … hopefully … ya know.”

“I know! I know. Sorry.” Ed’s right and he knows Ed’s right. Still wants to crawl out of his skin imagining what it will feel like to wake up two days from now with nothing to do and nowhere to be, drowning in the soup of his parents’ misery. He wishes there was a spell, some perfect combination of words to make Ed change his mind, get him to run, now, together.

“Tomorrow’s just another day,” Ed says, “another stupid school function. You f*ckin’ go, you f*ckin’ endure it, and then it’s over, and it’s just another summer vacation.”

“Ed, I can’t go to that ceremony.”

“You gotta go, mate. Rite of passage sh*t.”

“Since when you do you care about pageantry?”

“I don’t. But you do.”

“And when I get up there and nobody claps and half of the class boos, and my parents aren’t even there to be proud of me, then what, Ed? I’ll look like a fool.”

“Nah, you won’t. I’ll be there. I’ll cheer so f*ckin’ loud, I’ll drown out all those other f*ckers.”

Stede feels tears prick his eyes.

“You … you will?”

“Sure, man, course.”

It’s a gorgeous, sunny day, perfect for an outdoor ceremony. And Stede prays for a meteor, a thunderstorm, locusts, something. Time keeps edging forward, though, somehow, the motions keep going through themselves. His body is dressed. His shoes are tied. His bag is packed.

As he walks up to the school, he stops dead a block away. There is Ed on the sidewalk, talking to someone. From the back, Stede can see that the person has longish blonde hair and a fringed leather vest that is somehow wrong for this era, this season, and this occasion all at once. He is doing something with a hacky sack that mostly involves it falling to the ground over and over again. Ed laughs with his head back and his throat bared, and Stede feels what’s left of his resolve drain out of him just as Ed spots him in the distance.

Ed introduces the mustache—er, man—as Jack, describes him as an old pal, and Stede can feel himself making a kind of rodent face he is powerless to stop.

“So weird to be back in this sh*t hole,” Jack says. “Girlfriend is graduating. She’d kill me if I wasn’t here. Savannah, isn’t that a hot name? Don’t look at me like that, she’s 18.”

“Charming,” Stede says.

“Bisexual,” Jack adds, for some reason, and Stede tries desperately to pretend he doesn’t know what that reason is. “More like I take what I can get, right Eddie?”

Jack slaps Ed on the back, and Ed’s laugh is one Stede’s never heard, sharp as the edge of a knife. Sun glints off his necklaces. His hand is on Jack’s shoulder.

“So, you here for your girlfriend, Steve?”

“Stede. And no, erm, I’m ... it’s me. Graduating.”

“And you’re walking? My god, why?”

“Because I actually graduated,” Stede scoffs. “Did you?”

Jack looks at the ground. His mouth twists. “Wouldn’t let me. Was supposed to, last year but. Missed too many classes.”

He sniffles, and it’s the worst acting Stede’s ever seen.

“My dad lost his license, you know, because of the drinking, and I couldn’t be seen taking the bus like some idiot.”

“Easy, Stede, that was a rough year for him.”

“Oh, erm. Sorry?”

“Eh, no sweat, Steve, wouldn’t see me up there like some boot licker anyway, all thank you for my useless diploma, ooh, maybe I’ll make something of myself with it. Haha. Loser sh*t, right Eddie?”

“Come on, let’s get you settled,” Ed says to Stede.

“Oh, speaking of,” Jack says. He pulls a flask out of his back pocket, offers it to Ed.

“Nah man, I’m good. Stede?”

“No thank you,” Stede says, recoiling at the thought of any part of his body touching that mustache, even by proxy.

“Ooh, so polite, Eddie, I like this one. Can he balance a f*ckin’ book on his head, too?”

“Alright, alright, let’s go.”

Jack hefts a large backpack off the ground with a grunt of effort, slings it over his right shoulder. Stede wonders what’s in it. Certainly not books.

Inside, Stede shuffles toward the table labeled ‘B’ to receive all the accoutrements. The color of the robe is awful against his skin tone and none of the cap sizes fit right and all of them ruin his hair. From the corner of his eye, he sees Ed and Jack, at the far end of the gymnasium, and watches in fury as Ed faces the wall, bending to covertly sip from the flask.

At least someone is having a nice time today, Stede thinks bitterly.

When he’s all suited up and ready to get in the endless line of his faceless peers, the one person he wants to see is nowhere to be found.

He ducks in the bathroom to consider the merits of bolting at this late hour. He could hang all this sh*t on a hook in a stall and walk away. Ed wouldn’t even notice.

And suddenly, to his left: Jack. Stede can smell the whiskey on him. Not even smart enough to choose vodka, Stede thinks. Stede barely even drinks and he knows to choose vodka.

“So. How do you know Eddie?”

“We met at work. Became friends,” Stede says, defensive for no reason.

“Eddie doesn’t have friends,” Jack says. “He has people he can use to get what he needs and then,“ he zips his fly, “it’ll be so long Steve.”

What is Ed getting from him? A companion, sure. But also: a future. They’re going to get out of here together and Stede’s said it a hundred times and Ed can’t do it on his own, Stede knows that, and—

“Good luck up there,” Jack sneers. “Heard this thing can get pretty … exciting.”

Stede wants to grind the sole of his shoe into that smarmy grin until all that comes out of it is blood and broken teeth.

“Ooohhh,” Jack says, doing jazz hands as he exits backwards, “aahhh….”

The line of students snakes through the grass to their rows of seats. The bleachers behind are packed with parents and friends, cheering and chatting, pointing, crying. People overflow on both sides of the bleachers, standing and sitting in groups. A gaggle of children runs around in the grass, laughing. They are counting back from ten in unison for some reason. Stede wonders what will happen when they get to one.

It takes him a minute, but he does spot Jack and Ed. They’re way behind the bleachers, almost at the fence, sharing a cigarette, oblivious to the fact that the event they’re ostensibly here to observe has begun. Stede’s stomach twists.

He finds his seat and sits stiffly on the folding chair. The fabric of the gown itches at his neck, and he adjusts his collar again to keep it off his skin. He will have a red patch when he finally removes it.

The sun is hot. He feels dizzy. He wishes he had taken a sip of the whiskey, a thought that makes him writhe in place with rage and shame. He is aware of a feeling of wanting to go home. Not to his literal home, of course, all that’s there are the echoes of his own pathetic crying. He wants something different altogether. A couch worn to the shape of familiar bodies. A blanket. Someone to bring him tea, perhaps even soup. Someone to touch his foot gently with cold fingertips and tell him it will be okay, that all of this will pass. That’s it’s scary but it’s nothing they can’t handle together.

He sighs. Adjusts his neck, again. He risks a glance over his shoulder. Ed is nowhere to be found. Probably long gone. Who can blame him?

The talking is endless. The speeches are dull and predictable and full of the kind of boastful optimism that has always made him want to laugh in the face of the person spewing it. The doors to tomorrow are not open for everyone, he thinks bitterly at the valedictorian, wishing he had some rotten produce to throw at her. There are fewer doors than ever, and more close every day, in fact. Everyone around him will be ordinary. Everyone will melt into sameness. The only person in this entire world Stede believes could exist beyond the confines of humdrum survival is—

“Oh brother, they lay this on so thick,” the woman in front of him whispers as she bends to pick up the sunglasses she has dropped. Her name is Mary Allamby and in biology lab last year she did most of the worm dissection so Stede wouldn’t have to leave the room to vomit.

“Tell me about it,” he whispers back. She chuckles, turns back. Her smile is luminous.

The interaction soothes him somewhat. Still, it chafes. The robe chafes and the ceremony chafes and that Jack person, all of it chafes.

The cue comes, and his row stands. He is grateful to be at the beginning of the alphabet, at least. The line snakes around the chairs and toward the big tent adjacent to the stage where they’ll snap their photo before they cross and do the silly little handshake. Stede’s jaw hurts from grinding his teeth.

He shuffles into the opening of the tent. There is a blister forming on his small toe. He is thirsty. Somehow, it is hotter in the tent. There are ten people between him and the camera.

And then, Ed ducks under the side of the tent.

“Ed?” Stede breathes.

“Come on,” Ed whispers, out of breath, “we’re getting out of here. Now. Let’s go.”

Ed grabs his arm and pulls him toward the edge of the tent he is still holding up with one hand. Heart beating wild, Stede follows.

“You came back,” he says. They exit behind the stage, walking fast away from the tent, Stede shedding his miserable gown and hat as he goes.

“Never left,” Ed says with a wink. “Come on, come on, we gotta jet.”

He breaks into a jog, and Stede follows, confused until the first bang, whistle, skitter.

“My god, was that—”

“It’s fine, I promise, I’ll explain, let’s get out of here.”

Someone screams. Another bang, another whistle. More screaming. The chaotic sounds of people running, chairs falling over.

“Jack,” Ed says, slowing to a walk as they make it to the road. He shakes his head, exasperated. “Romantic gesture.”

“That big backpack, it was full of—”

“Fireworks, yeah. f*ckin’ lunatic. Can you believe? It’s always something with him. Figured we’d wanna be long gone. That idiot’s probably gonna spend the night in f*ckin’ jail. You’d have been stuck for hours getting questioned.”

“He ruined that whole day for everyone,” Stede says, bursting with a confusing mix of awe and gratitude and relief and schadenfreude. “Almost want to thank him, except those people are probably traumatized.“

Ed laughs. Not the big Jack guffaw, but a shy chuckle that makes Stede feel too warm.

“Told you he’s not so bad,” Ed says. Then adds, “No, no, I’m kidding. He’s f*ckin’ awful. Absolute f*ckin’ worst. I always forget, though, like how they say people forget the pain of childbirth or something.”

“Your brain is protecting you,” Stede jokes.

“Probably. Anyway, you hungry?”

“Starving,” Stede lies.

Over pizza, Ed tells him the whole story.

“Like he was setting the whole spread up with a f*ckin’ cigarette dangling from his lip, Stede, and I knew, it was like the gift of f*ckin’ prophecy or something,” he says, laughing so hard he has to stop and compose himself. “I was like that sh*t’s gonna blow and you’re gonna lose minimum two fingers and then! Somehow! Against all logic and evidence, you’re gonna find some way to blame it on me. Tough sh*t, asshole, I’m gonna be sitting cozy in a booth a the sh*tty pizza place nobody will want to take their f*ckin’ families to.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. When I tried to leave, he accused me of drinking all his bourbon—which I didn’t—and said if I stayed, he’d let me take half of the credit so I could,” and here he pauses to laugh so hard he has to press his head down to the table, “so I could f*cking impress you, can you believe it? He just wanted someone around to take the fall, I mean he’s so transparent it’s—”

“Ed, look!”

On the tiny television in the corner of the shop, the local news shows Jack spitting on the ground as he’s being lowered into the back of a police cruiser. The crawl at the bottom reads AREA DROPOUT RUINS GRADUATION WITH FAILED FIREWORKS PRANK, SEAGULL DEAD, and Ed shoots soda out of his nose. He collapses onto the table, and his hair bounces with his laughter, and Stede would do anything to keep this. Keep it safe, keep it theirs, just keep it.

--

Ed’s right, after all. Time limps along.

Minty’s takes him on full time. It’s a grind, but not if he takes it shift by shift. He mostly works nights, because those are the shifts Ed works, and because it keeps him out of the house during most of the hours his father is at home and awake.

His father mostly ignores him, except to occasionally bark about starting to charge him rent. He never does it, though. In the meantime, Stede saves money with a determined fastidiousness that has him picking quarters up off the sidewalk. In single digit months, he and Ed will get the hell out of this place, and it is up to him to make it happen.

Because Ed? His savings keep getting wiped out. His mother needs it, the rent is late, the fridge is empty, the electric is threatening to cut off service, and on and on and on. It doesn’t matter, not at all, Stede will happily do it himself, he’ll endure the busloads of screeching pre-teen volleyball players and interminable days of stony silence from his father. For Ed, he will.

Time passes. When the days are over—when Ed is quiet and melancholy from class and when Stede is dead on his feet from eight hours of sweating over a vat of oil, when Stede limps into Ed’s room with a paper bag full of lukewarm dinner—then, and only then, Stede feels it all fall away. Ed cracks them beers or pours rum into glasses and they turn on the crackly radio to drown out the world and they talk or they don’t, and gradually, soothingly, warmly, the present morphs into the future.

It will all change in June. That’s Stede’s story now.

And then: a Tuesday in September, almost a year to the day after his first shift at Minty’s. Stede opens the door to the room at his father’s house he no longer thinks of as His, and there, on the desk, is an envelope addressed to him. The return address is another state, one he’s never been too. He squints in suspicion.

Inside the envelope is a note indicating his mother’s father’s father has died, and beneath the note is a check. On the line next to PAY TO THE ORDER OF is Stede’s name, and next to that is a number he has to check three times before his brain will absorb it, and THAT is when time, for several breathless seconds, ceases to pass.

Chapter 2: ticket to anywhere

Chapter Text

YEAR TWO

- SEPTEMBER -

The church is enormous.

There are fifteen odd people clustered in pews near the front. It serves to highlight the vast emptiness of both the space and the man they’re gathered to mourn, Stede thinks.

It smells like incense.

At the front of the aisle is a closed coffin draped in white. There is a single floral arrangement sitting on top of the casket.

Ed has said he can’t leave right now. His mother needs him too much and will be too disappointed if he doesn’t finish his senior year and because he feels too much guilt about all of it. Money, it turns out, does not change everything.

Stede is working on accepting this, he is.

He shakes his father’s hand like they’ve just done a business deal. He kisses his mother on the cheek like a mistress.

Nobody looks sad. They mostly look bored.

Stede stands in the cluster of his extended family, shaking hand at the ready, flexing and straightening the fingers of the non-shaking hand. Someone says you’ve gotten so big,like he’s a seven-year-old. His second cousin recalls a family reunion where they once, apparently, met. Another person says he looks just like his father these days, and Stede’s smile is so empty he could secret away an entire lifetime of hatred in its recesses.

A relative who smells like tuna asks him about college, and Stede lies so automatically it shocks him. He goes on lying effortlessly, fake answers to stupid questions like a politician. He wonders idly when he learned how to do this.

Finally, someone clears their throat meaningfully and everyone trudges off to find a seat.

The pastor or priest or emcee or whomever has their back to the crowd because he is fussing with a big photo and an easel set next to the coffin. There had been much anxiety over the photo choice—Stede had heard his mother on the phone about it. By the end, Stede’s great grandfather had been jaundiced and emaciated and missing most of his teeth and one of his eyes. He’d been refusing to attend family gatherings for twenty years and was belligerent to the visitors who gradually stopped showing up. His first wife, Stede’s great grandmother, was dead, and all four of his subsequent wives had left, wisely absconding with their alimony payments, and nobody knew how to reach them. Not being the kind of man who keeps albums or mementos, nobody could produce a photo of him, recent or otherwise. His mother had fielded no fewer than three phone calls from her aunts asking her to triple and quadruple check.

The man sets up the easel, lifts the poster board, sets it there, and goes to take his place at the pulpit.

It’s a photograph of a golf ball. It stands solitary in a field of green grass so vividly oversaturated it seems illicit amid the somber palette of the church interior, which contains all the thrilling variety of the coat of an average golden retriever.

A man so hated the only photo his own family could think to display at his very funeral was a stock photo of a golf ball. A golf ball.

A golf ball.

Ed is not leaving with him and his great grandfather—a Real Man, a titan, a leader—is a golf ball and he doesn’t understand what a second cousin is and his great grandfather is a golf ball, and Stede cannot keep it in. His father elbows him. He covers his mouth with both hands and a snort escapes and people are looking at him. The pastor or priest or emcee or whomever clears his throat again and it only makes him laugh harder. His stomach hurts from trying to suppress it. For the first time in his life, he wants to tip his head back like Ed at Minty’s, laugh from his diaphragm, full-throated. He wants to scream with it, get down onto the floor between the pews and pound on the floor with his fists until they cuff him and take him away—

Two weeks later and he has acquired a used burnt orange 1997 Ford Escort in excellent condition with low mileage and an unfortunate bumper sticker that says REVENGE in black mock-stencil letters. He cleans the car and waxes it until it glimmers like a goldfish. He scrubs and vacuums the interior until the stains are gone from the seats and the ashtray looks brand new and the steering wheel no longer feels sticky to the touch. He picks all the little stones out of the tire treads. He diligently scrubs out the cupholders.

No matter what he does, that bumper sticker won’t budge.

So, fine, he thinks. Perhaps it’s fitting. He refocuses his attention to using the tip of his pocket knife to carve old dirt and crumbs out from the little grooves around the shifter.

He parks it at the street, half so his father won’t complain about taking up driveway space and half to be a spiteful little sh*t.

Revenge, then. Fine.

He misses Ed, but not enough to break the stalemate between them.

It’s just that he worries Ed’s mother is selfishly manipulating him into staying, and he doesn’t know how to broach the subject without sounding as though he is, in turn, selfishly manipulating Ed into going.

He’d been doing some magical thinking about the Bonnie and Clyde of it all, the two of them on the road, escaping, finally. He’s taken things too far again, gotten too excited. He’s always too much, fine.

His feelings are hurt, yes. So he’s giving Ed the Bonnet special. Which is to say he’s avoiding him.

And Ed, for his part, seems to be letting him stew.

Stede knows, okay, he knows he has to be the one to lose at this game of chicken, and he will. He’s just not ready yet. The hurt is too fresh.

Ed has said next year. After graduation. Reasonable.

It is nearing the first of the month. He was dreaming they’d be gone by now. In his imagination, they spend Halloween wandering wide-eyed around the city, sh*tty cobbled-together costumes from their respective closets, Ed some sort of leather-clad pirate, maybe. Stede could wear all of his fancy clothes at once in discordant layers, go as some affected dandy.

The clock radio says 2:43. Time to head to Minty’s. He folds the knife back up, shoves it in the glove box. His uniform is neatly pressed and folded, sitting in a cube on the backseat. At least he doesn’t have to walk there while wearing it anymore, pretending he doesn’t notice the people in passing cars shouting orders for large fries at him.

“For you, man,” Pete says, handing him the cordless phone, slippery with ambient grease. “I’ll watch the register.”

Before he even puts his ear to the phone, he’s angry. His father calling him at work? The audacity. His father would scream him deaf, he would call him a moron, would accuse him of trying to get him fired, would—

“Mate, we gotta go.”

“Ed?”

“Yeah, mate, it’s Ed, listen, I know it’s been weird, I’m sorry, okay, but I gotta go, now. Please, Stede.”

Ed sounds … different. His voice is liquidy and shrill, he’s talking fast.

The air around Stede goes still. The inoffensive overhead music turns to a whoosh in his head.

Ed really means it.

He steps into the office to hear better and tries not to look at the desk where Ed had pressed against him.

“Do you mean …. GO go?”

“Yeah.” He sniffs. “I’ll explain later, but it’s, ya know, f*ckin stupid, and … listen I gotta get off the phone, as soon as you can, okay?”

He peeks out of the office. The dinner rush is in full swing. There are three people at the tills and two more behind them and the line of cars in the drive-thru snakes clean around to the other side, idling cars with open windows going almost to the entrance to the lot. He stares at the TV monitor over the grill, as order after order after order appears on it.

“I’ll be there in ten,” Stede says.

He passes through the grill area, nimbly stepping around his coworkers, light on his feet.

“Family emergency,” he says as he goes, pulling off his visor, his tie.

“You can’t just LEAVE, they’ll fire you,” Pete splutters. “It’s the middle of goddamn dinner!”

“Oh, right,” Stede says, keys in hand. He picks up two random bags of food that are ready to go out the drive-thru window—Ed might be hungry. “Tell them I quit. Thanks!”

- DECEMBER -

He takes a break from chatting, sits on the couch. From across the room, Ed gives him a warm smile, and that’s all he needs. He’s not used to this stuff—friends, parties, people in his space—but he’s getting there. With Ed’s help. With Ed, he feels safe.

It’s growing on him, anyway. There’s a catharsis to the big laughs in the warm space that he’s learning to love. The mingling colognes, the interrupted stories. He feels at once shockingly grown-up and impossibly young. It reminds him of Minty’s, the first time he realized he had people. It reminds him that he is more than a collection of disappointments in a button-down shirt. He is, in fact, alive.

More importantly, Ed is alive. Alive and vibrant and big-eyed and perfect as he tells everyone at the party silly stories about working at Minty’s. The headset pranks, the sauce fights on the roof, the weird food concocted in the middle of the night out of boredom. The stuff Stede mostly watched with a laugh from a polite distance, afraid to get in trouble.

“Don’t be fooled by the wallflower demeanor,” Ed is telling Ivan, gesturing with his rum and co*ke toward Stede, “he’s one of the quiet ones they warn you about.”

Stede laughs. Shakes his head. Waves politely.

He feels warm as he watches Ed talk. Ed gestures big, he performs, he commands a room. It’s hypnotizing.

Ed looks different now. He’s been letting his hair grow. It’s almost to his shoulders, wavy and unruly, and it suits him. His beard has grown in, too, thick and black. That, too, suits him, right along with his black clothes, his leather jacket, his boots. He’s the same Ed as before, only concentrated, like the can of frozen limeade Archie and her terrifying biceps is dumping in the blender for frozen margaritas. Ed would look out of place back home, like a time traveler from the past or the future, but here, on the outskirts of the city, he looks like he spawned on the sidewalk.

Stede wonders sometimes, whether it’s all borne of aesthetic preference or something else, the entropy of depression, the flash-freeze of grief perhaps. He’s fine now, loose with rum and good company, holding court. But sometimes these days he looks like a cat that’s about to bolt from the room.

Sometimes, Stede wishes he could break him open like a piggy bank, see what’s really inside. Mostly, though, he’s so relieved to be here with him he feels like a different person. He laughs, now, every day, with Ed.

Ed has elected not to reveal the incident that pushed him to call Minty’s that night. Stede had loaded his sh*t into the car as Ed collapsed into the passenger seat. Stede had taken him back to his father’s house for the night, reasoning that nobody ever went into his room and why would they now. Ed had taken a twenty minute shower, come out still looking pale, and climbed directly into Stede’s bed. He’d cried all night, head on Stede’s chest, and Stede had thought: I can do this. I can be this. We will survive it.

In the morning, Stede had loaded his half of the car, and before he’d pulled away, Ed spoke for the first time since the phone call: thank you.

Will you tell me what happened, Ed?

A long pause, and then, Someday.

All Stede could do now was trust him—that he really is okay, that he probably would share when he felt ready, that he is not actually too sad to get a haircut. They’re in this together after all.

They belong to each other, here.

And anyway, Ed looks radiant. He’s doing fine. He had a job, albeit briefly, bussing tables at a fancy French restaurant. He quit in a huff after a rude table, something about the wrong forks, but no matter, he’s looking again. In the meantime, Stede’s office job at the gym that Archie and her terrifying biceps pointed him toward is enough to mostly pay the bills, with a little help from the remaining inheritance.

Apart from his employment status—or lack thereof—Ed is thriving. He has an ever-growing list of places in the city and its environs he wants to go to, parks and bookstores and cafes, outdoor concerts by the pier, block parties in different neighborhoods. Together, they cross items off his list, one by one, bus ride by bus ride, drive by drive. Ed’s got a little silver digital camera he found at the Goodwill. He uses it all day long, taking pictures of everything they do, everywhere they go, meals and outfits and weird plants in the park and graffiti and dogs and yes, this party—it’s in his back pocket now, Stede can see it. The whir of the lens extending, the click of the shutter—Stede hears them in his dreams.

Ed’s got a good eye. His photos seem to tilt the world on its axis. Ordinary things jump out of the frame. He finds colors in juxtaposition. He finds a way to make everything look realer than life.

It’s turned into something of a project for Ed, one to which he devotes himself tirelessly. He uses the computer Stede bought with what was left of the inheritance after the car and the apartment to edit and caption and catalog the photos. He’s even got a little blog going—he had to explain to Stede what this was, and Stede’s still not totally sure. Ed’s better at computer things than Stede is. An absolute wizard, in fact. Stede finds him hunched over the desk at all hours, typing away. It’s been fun to watch him come alive doing it. It makes Ed happy, and he’s glad for anything with that effect, after, you know, everything.

Ed’s good. He’s good. He’s been so excited for today—their holiday party. The first party they’ve thrown at their place. They’ve decorated, courtesy of the Goodwill down the block. String lights in the bay windows, a pink tinsel tree on the side table, paper cups with a misprinted poinsettia motif they’d picked up for fifty cents a sleeve, some avant-garde indoor wreath covered in silver glitter that Ed is currently wearing as a hat. Atop all the black leather and all that hair, it looks nothing short of a crown. It rains glitter down into his hair, onto his shoulders. He catches all the light in the room.

And everyone in the building came, which makes Stede feel like they really belong here. It’s not quite the same as the Minty’s crew—these folks are a little disjointed, rough at the edges—but together, they’re a very good time.

From upstairs: Ivan and Fang in the front apartment, plus Fang’s black lab Mitten (one white paw), curled into a neat circle on his bed in the corner, overseeing sleepily. Also upstairs, in the rear apartment, is Zheng, who shares her apartment officially with her aunt (who is not at the party) and unofficially with Olu (who is at the party). (Stede is aware of a betting pool about when their relationships status will evolve—he has not joined the fun.)

Downstairs in the front apartment is Frenchie, a tall and mysterious figure who is never not carrying an instrument of some kind. Today it is a kalimba, and he noodles on it absently, as though not aware he’s doing it. The sound is soothingly hollow, all reverberation. It gives Stede chills.

Downstairs in the back is Archie of the terrifying biceps, who has recently escaped a cult of some kind. She’s brash and funny with bad manners and a warm smile and, again, absolutely terrifying biceps.

Stede and Ed’s apartment is on the second floor, facing the street. They’d gotten the place in only a few hours, some combination of luck and determination and Ed’s irresistible charm. The building is an old victorian, once a single family home, now chopped into six apartments. The heat works intermittently and the paint almost certainly contains lead and the windows rattle when you open and close them. And every time Stede enters, he feels like he can finally breathe.

There’s only one bedroom, but the apartment is a wonky shape with a sort of extra space off the living room, what would perhaps normally serve as a small dining nook, and Ed’s fashioned it into a perfectly adequate space for himself. Ed had insisted Stede take the real bedroom because it’s your money, mate, a statement with which Stede did not fully agree, but one of them had to take it and it didn’t seem worth arguing over.

And it didn’t matter, not really. They’ve cobbled together a home out of thrift store furniture and sidewalk finds thanks to Stede’s gift for plucking the treasure from the dross. The silverware doesn’t match and the curtains aren’t hemmed, but Stede doesn’t care a whit because Ed has a dresser—antique, Swedish style, painted a minty green—with three large drawers and two small ones that open and close all the way. When they’d found it down the block outside of an apartment someone had just vacated, Stede had cried. He’d stood there, guarding it, as Ed had schlepped it back to their place two drawers at a time. They’d carried the frame up the hill together. He cried again when it was in Ed’s room, and Ed called him a lunatic with palpable fondness.

And then of course, in the rear apartment on their floor: Izzy Hands.

Izzy is someone Stede’s, well, still getting his hands around (ha ha). He seems to be some sort of junior landlord, enforcing both the rules and the suggestions with dedicated efficiency and ruthless vigor, making the rounds daily, cleaning out the common area by the mailboxes, posting signs everywhere about what everyone’s doing wrong. CLOSE THE BACK DOOR YOU f*ckS and CLEAN OUT THE f*ckING LINT TRAP and LOCK THE GATE OR DIE, and so on. Stede’s as annoyed by him as he is grateful. He gets the sense this building would collapse into its foundation if these people were left to themselves.

“What in the f*cking f*ck of sh*t is a blog,” he rasps now, making a face at Ed, and Stede feels himself get defensive on Ed’s behalf. He expects Ed to fly into a rage, tell him off, but Ed laughs.

“It’s like a diary that’s public, you shriveled old f*ck,” Ed says.

Ed seems to know how to handle him. Stede … has some warming up to do, apparently.

Maybe they could start tonight, Stede thinks optimistically (the rum is helping). Izzy’s here, after all, along with everyone else. Anything could happen. Everything since Ed appeared in his life seems to have taken on a sublime surreality, like he’s fallen through the earth and landed on the other side of its surface. It’s all possible, here.

Stede comes back into himself as the couch dips beside him.

“Frenchie! How are things, my friend?”

“Bit of romance in the air, I believe,” he says, looking at Zheng and Olu making eyes at each other in the bay window next to Ed and Izzy, a party unto themselves. “Think someone might be winning some coin pretty soon.”

Frenchie plucks something dreamy on his kalimba as punctuation.

“I think you may be right,” Stede says with a wistful smile. “Are you the one who started that pool?”

Frenchie winks, which is an answer.

Ed’s talking and Izzy is laughing with a kind of enthusiasm Stede would never have guessed he could muster. He smacks Ed playfully with the arm not holding his cup. Stede wonders which story Ed is wearing on his sleeve today.

“What about you?”

“Oh,” Stede says, distracted watching them, “I didn’t bet.”

Izzy and Ed are talking animatedly over each other now, laughing, Ed’s hand on Izzy’s shoulder and Izzy’s hand up on Ed’s, a contorted mirror image, warped by the liquor and the twinkle lights and the discordant notes of Frenchie’s kalimba. Ed looks the happiest Stede’s seen him since—

“No, mate, I’m trying to get a read on you. Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”

“Oh, no, no, nothing for me,” he says, like he’s declining an appetizer.

Something simmers on low inside of him. Boyfriend. Perhaps it is the liquor that finally allows him to sit through his brain’s initial outright rejection of the premise, and then through the ensuing shame, eventually trying to consider the question with a modicum of distance. To be asked so casually about a possibility he’d been dismissing or dodging his whole life was strange, surprising, scary. Frenchie is not the first person to imply he’s gay—or even outright ask it—but he is the first person to do it kindly, plainly, with open curiosity. It’s not an accusation, from Frenchie, and maybe that’s why he feels so calm.

Stede doesn’t think he is gay. If he was, he would know, right? People know those things?

“And Stede,” Ed is saying. Stede perks up. “Stede f*ckin’ walked out in the middle of his shift, can you believe it? Stede, you lunatic, get over here, I’m talking about you.”

Ed’s smile reaches to his eyes and beyond, across the room, into Stede’s guts. Something magical happens inside of Stede, then, some full-body wave of contentment, of belonging, of warm, blooming surety. He loves Ed, and Ed loves him back, and they are here because they saved each other. He is so happy that his heart aches. He has never felt such fondness in his life.

He stands. He goes.

“The f*ck, the f*cking,” Stede can barely get a sentence out. His giggle is high-pitched and deranged. “The f*cking woman insulted my soup, okay, I wasn’t going to pay for the f*cking carrots after that.”

It’s god knows what time in the morning, Stede and Ed on the couch, Izzy in the chair opposite, arms folded. Izzy smirks, but doesn’t seem as enchanted by the story as they are by its retelling. Stede barely cares, though. He is laughing so hard it hurts, it aches, it pierces him. He is very drunk, and Ed is very drunk, room swimming drunk, couch undulating drunk, stupid carrot soup story regaling drunk. Stede, for the umpteenth time that night, decides he is the happiest he’s ever been.

“So he f*cking, he f*cking just stole them. The carrots, f*ck—”

“Who asks—who asks what you’re making and then says I don’t like that, it’s gauche, Ed!”

“f*ckin’— gauche, Stede?” Ed says, crying actual tears. “What does that even f*ckin’ mean?”

“It means—means rude,” Stede says, and collapses again. “She called my soup horse food. Didn’t even ask about the garnishes!”

“Dickf*ck, I know what the f*ck it means, I mean who asks,” Ed pauses to laugh, doubling over, “who f*ckin’ asks about those?”

They laughed about it for hours, Stede storming out of the market with a shirt full of carrots, Linda the cashier screaming from the till. Ed had laughed so hard at his impotent rage over her dislike of carrot soup that it had caught, Stede’s sour mood going stupid and giggly.

“It’s two,” Izzy says, checking his watch. “Should get some sleep.

Stede had completely forgotten he was there.

Izzy must leave. Stede doesn’t register it. They’re too busy making up stories about Linda, how she sneers whenever her loving partner makes her soup for dinner, how she insults customers buying produce no matter what they say they’re cooking. They’ve invented an entire Linda extended universe complete with heroes and villains and set dressing.

Stede comes to and they are kissing. They are kissing and the air is gone and the couch is upside down hanging from the ceiling and the twinkle lights pulse with his raging heart and the ghost of Frenchie’s kalimba echoes over Stede’s scalp and Ed is kissing him. He feels the ground drop out from beneath him, feels the gut-churning free-fall of knowing he is exactly where he is supposed to be.

Ed’s mouth is a softness he didn’t know existed in this world.

“Stede, f*ck,” Ed says, and grips his face with both hands, and Stede has to close his eyes against a wave of arousal. It moves through him like a bulldozer, shoving everything else out of the way. In its wake, a clear, empty highway leading straight to Ed.

Is he allowed to be aroused by this?

Ed crawls into his lap, straddling him on the couch, gripping him with an intensity suggesting that, yes, he is, in fact, meant to be aroused by this.

He must have started this, Stede thinks.

“Got glitter on you,” Ed says. He giggles, wipes it with his thumb.

He is very close and Stede is very drunk and the room is very dim, but Ed’s big eyes show a naked want so close to pain as to be indistinguishable. Ed is soft and needy. There is need in every inch of him, from his little huff of breath to his fingers on Stede’s face to the press of his pelvis into Stede’s lap, and Stede never would have expected this, never in a lifetime. Ed could have anything, anyone, any time. Stede’s hands roam Ed’s warm back, and Ed groans, arches. His hands head south automatically, gripping Ed’s ass through the leather.

“Finally,” Ed says, stroking Stede’s lower lip with his thumb. “f*cking finally,” he says again, burying his head in Stede’s neck, nosing at the corner of Stede’s jaw, beard tickling Stede’s skin, hips moving, and Stede doesn’t think he could manage to speak if the apartment was on fire.

“Bedroom,” Ed breathes. “Please.”

He’s up and gone in a shot, pulling his t-shirt over his head and dropping it to the floor, a lazy trail of glitter following it. There is so much Stede should think about, about himself and what this means, about what tomorrow will look like, but he can’t focus because Ed looks so vulnerable standing shirtless in their house, chest heaving with his breath. He is too far gone and Ed needs it too much. He is beyond the portal now, past the pulsing walls and out the other side, where Ed has been waiting, hand out in invitation. It’s a place Stede has feared to step his entire life, and Ed has brought him there so fearlessly, so kindly, effortlessly.

It’s not a fantasy, he realizes through the rum haze. It’s real.

“Hey. I want this,” Ed says, warm palms on Stede’s face, reading his mind incorrectly. Eyes big enough to swallow him whole.

And this, Stede thinks, is what he’s supposed to do with the love he feels for Ed.

How has Stede missed something so big?

What else has he missed?

Ed lifts Stede’s shaking hands and places them on his stomach. He sits up.

Once when he was younger, he saw the Grand Canyon. The awe bordered on panic as all the things he thought he knew about the scale of things evaporated, like all the laws of physics disbanded at once. His eyes wouldn’t focus. The air wouldn’t fill his lungs. The ground beneath him felt unreal, like it, too, could become void any second.

And he cried, then, too.

Ed’s eyes close as Stede’s palm runs up the front of him, over the rise and fall of his breath, over the swell of his pec, to where his fingers graze Ed’s collar bone. He presses his face into the soft hair around Ed’s navel, and Ed’s breath goes short. Ed pulls him up off the couch, giggles as they lose their balance and regain it in each other’s arms.

The bedroom is cold and nobody flicks the light on. It’s too dark to see and that drops Stede—acutely, devastatingly—into his body. The world disappears into sensation. Fabric dragging on his skin as his clothes are discarded, Ed’s rum-sweet breath on his neck, the whine in Ed’s throat.

The instant Ed’s fist gets around Stede’s co*ck, Stede knows Ed’s done this before. There is no hesitancy, only brazen enthusiasm. Some blessed mirror neuron activates and he gets his hand onto Ed’s co*ck too, notes the differences in size, girth, texture, forgets it all as Ed’s hand starts moving. He wishes he could bifurcate his brain, devote one half to the wonder of Ed’s co*ck in his palm, the softness of him there, the way his breathing changes, while devoting the other half to the sickening pleasure of a hand that isn’t his own stroking his painfully erect co*ck. Into thirds, perhaps, so he can study this moment from some distance to remember it. He tries to bring his focus to Ed’s hand, where things are most urgent, but he can’t, because Ed moans, and his attention switches.

There is a strand of spit between Ed’s mouth and his. He is grateful to the liquor or this would have been over already. Ed gasps and grunts and Stede looks down just in time to see Ed come all over his fist, his bed, his idea of himself as a person, and it scares him how immediately he feels it because sex is not something that comes intuitively to him. It zaps him into his body, into the tight heat of Ed’s fist on his co*ck. His back arches. His hands move without his conscious awareness, groping at Ed, the sheets, whatever they can find. He can hear himself whining and he wills himself to stay here, stay awake, stay present—

“But I love you,” Ed says, brow furrowed.

“Ed, I love you too, you know I do. Only I’m … well, I’m not sure I’m, you know.” Stede swallows. Closes his eyes. “Gay.”

He’d woken that morning to a blade of light piercing his retina through his eyelids somehow. He’d realized he was naked, at which point he’d opened his eyes to see his foot sticking out from under the blanket—and another foot touching it. Ed’s, he’d realized blearily. It had forced a shriek from his throat before he could stop it.

Ed had woken, chuckled, kissed him on the cheek, and Stede watched numb as he left the room nude. He’d had to feel his wrist to make sure his heart was beating.

Ed had returned wearing some old shorts, carrying water and Advil, and curled up with his head on Stede’s chest. Perceptive as he is, it had taken less than twenty seconds for him to realize Stede was silently hyperventilating.

He sits up now, legs pretzeled, watching Stede closely with those goddamn eyes.

“I’m not gay either, Stede.”

“Okay, well, that feels like splitting hairs.”

“It feels like splitting hairs to say that I’m bisexual?”

“The point is that you know what you are and I don’t, I—”

“Stede, hey come on.” Ed takes his hands. “It’s okay to be scared, or nervous or whatever.”

“I’m not scared, Ed,” he lies, because it’s never been safe to be scared and why would it now? He pulls his hands away. Ed stares at them as they go and he feels like he wants to undo the motion as he is still completing it.

“Scared” is too meek a word, too ordinary. His chest is too small to contain his lungs. The hangover threatens to split him apart. Reality blinks on and off with his heartbeat like an alarm clock after a power outage. He’s too weak to stay in it permanently.

Surely he should take time to consider what his father would say, whether his mother would be disgusted, whether he can handle the idea of proving everyone who’s ever accused him of it correct—whether Ed being a finite thing is survivable.

After all, friends are forever. Relationships end.

A shiver races through him. Ed, leaving him for someone else, someone who’s sure, someone who can give a half-decent handjob. It would end him.

“I think you are scared,” Ed says. He smiles, but Stede can see there’s an edge to it and Stede hates him for knowing so well—for taking away his ability to hide from himself.

“Okay, well—you don’t understand, Ed, it’s … it’s more complicated for me.”

“Why, Stede? You hate your dad, sometimes I don’t think you’d recognize your mom if you walked past her in the grocery store, you’re in a city now, with plenty of other queer people, hell, everyone in this building is somewhere on the f*ckin’ rainbow, so tell me, what is holding you back? Is it me?”

And all Stede can do is shake his head. It’s all stuck behind the wall he’s adding bricks to by the second, taller and taller.

“Ed, of course not, I just. I didn’t know you wanted this, and didn’t have time last night to, to, you know, properly think through the potential implications of—“

“But you started this,” Ed says, face changing.

“What?” His head whips to look at Ed, and the room keeps going when it stops.

Ed stares. “You don’t remember.”

He doesn’t.

“Well,” Ed says, standing, “I guess that’s that, then.”

“Ed, wait,” Stede stammers. Ed’s eyes are big, but wrong. Hurt. Stede’s pulse pounds in his temples.

“No, it’s fine,” Ed says. “I understand. It’s cool. Casual. No big.”

Ed smiles weakly, picks up his underwear off the ground, his socks, his jeans.

“It’s just—I mean, what if we’re making a mistake?”

“Yeah, mate,” Ed says with a bitter laugh. “Wouldn’t want that.”

He closes the door behind him.

- MARCH -

Ed comes home with a tattoo. A dagger on his arm Stede knows is meant for his heart.

“Is that new?”

“Oh, yeah, last week,” he says.

Stede doesn’t ask how much it cost.

Ed still doesn’t have a job.

He’s paying his half, sure, hadn’t missed a cent since the day they woke up naked with unbroken hearts. Straight down the middle, every soup carrot, every bill. Stede isn’t sure where he’s getting the money, but thinks it’s something to do with his blog, maybe.

Still and all, it makes him nervous. Ed spending money on tattoos with no plan for his future?

He bites his tongue.

“Did it hurt?”


“Iz said it would, but I found it weirdly soothing. Almost fell asleep.”

Izzy. Of course. It’s always Izzy, these days. Izzy is older, cooler, meaner. He knows the bars Ed can get into and the parties Ed should attend and the people Ed should hang out with and apparently the artists who should stab Ed with needles. Izzy knows every goddamn thing about how Ed should live his life, and worse, he gets off on it, Stede thinks.

Stede used to be the one Ed looked up to. Not anymore.

He knows he ruined it. He isn’t stupid.

Whether he’s gay or not, he’s certainly a f*cking idiot.

Ed had left him there. He’d gone out that night, following through on some vague plan he’d made at the party with Izzy, and that was the end of their cozy carrot soup domestic life. Now, Ed was primarily interested in late nights and parties and drugs and all the other things Stede couldn’t manage with a full time job that barely makes rent.

He swallows his comments. With everything else.

Stede, hoisted as he is from his own petard, had forsaken the right to make any comments about how Ed lives, as they are not in a relationship with each other. They are roommates principally and, when he’s lucky, maybe friends.

And on odd, fleeting, thrilling occasions—despite Stede’s cowardly wormlike undeserving status—Ed is more.

It’s casual, to use Ed’s parlance, as though Stede has ever done anything casually in all his life.

“Wow,” Stede says from his post in the doorway to Ed’s room. Everything is fine. Every normal conversation is proof. “I love it.”

It’s Wednesday and there’s nothing to do. Being bored with Ed used to be his favorite thing.

Now, he can never suss the mood. Sometimes Ed bolts in the middle of whatever they’re doing. He’s got a cell phone now—another thing Stede doesn’t ask about. It vibrates, twice, quick, and the atmosphere warps to accommodate it. Iz, mate, sorry. For the blog.

The blog. Blackbeards revenge dot com. At first, the combination of his alter ego and Stede’s fast little car. Now, though, he is the titular Blackbeard, and Stede’s misery his revenge.

He’s got a whole persona on there, he’s explained. He puts on the leather jacket, the big boots, the sunglasses, the necklaces, the attitude. Eyeliner, nail polish, glitter on his cheekbones, a sort of soft-edged goth schtick. He goes to parties, to bars, to readings and performances. He takes the drinks offered to him—as well as the joints, the pills, and the blowj*bs. He takes photos, edits them. He writes it all up, that night or the next day, in his signature Blackbeard voice.

It’s half real and half performance art, Ed says.

Stede’s looked at it a few times, when Ed’s out of the house. It’s a dizzying thing to watch Ed bloom. In the rare photos in which Ed appears, he always looks like he belongs there. Light flares and bends around him as he sticks his tongue out, pretending to lick someone’s face. Or, he’s mid-spin in the dance floor, midriff exposed, hands to the sky as though in worship.

The writing is really something. It’s a wry mix of smart commentary, detached irony, bitchy judgement, and heartfelt awe to get to be alive in this beautiful world. Ed seems not careless but carefree, happiness undergirded by hopeful existential sadness.

Even Stede can’t tell which bits are real and which are the story Ed’s wearing. It’s a testament to Ed’s skill, Stede thinks, that he can’t peel his friend away from the character he’s playing. It’s like he did somehow manage to bifurcate his brain, his self. It’s amazing, actually.

So amazing that he never makes it through more than half an entry before the ache becomes too big to breathe around.

Still, Stede was moved to tears more than once by the world Ed sees, and by his apparent fearlessness to live fully inside it. Stede does not live fearlessly. He can’t even watch Ed live fearlessly without worrying. He doesn’t know when worrying became his sole province, but he’s been worried about Ed for so long he can’t seem to stop himself.

But the writing makes Ed happy, so he swallows that too. Worries silently. Waits to hear him come home.

Occasionally, though, there’s nothing to attend, and for a blink of a night, it can feel exactly like old times. And in some ways, that’s worse.

“Wanna watch something?” Ed asks, turning his arm this way and that.

So, old times then.

There’s an old Hitchco*ck film on, Notorious. They kill the lights and the room flickers with the TV. Stede pretends not to notice it’s a love story. At the commercial break, Ed catches Stede staring at the tattoo.

“Can I touch it?”

Ed swallows. Stede can see the shadow of his Adam’s apple move up and down.

“Doesn’t feel like anything,” Ed says, voice hushed.

Stede drags two fingers across his skin. Ed’s wrong—he can feel faint ridges where the lines are. Ed’s body, changing before his eyes. Different from the last time.

This is how it always starts. An easy night, just the two of them, physical contact Stede can tell himself is innocent.

“Stede,” Ed says. His big eyes are closed and his mouth is open, only just.

So Stede starts it, again. He tells himself it will be the last time, again.

And Stede could say it. There is always a moment when he could. He recognizes it when it appears. The portal still hums, even though it spit him out.

He could say that he lays awake torturing himself nightly about that morning after, about everything he didn’t know how to say. He could say Ed I’m so in love with you I’m sick over it but I know you won’t stay, it’s too late for that, I can tell you don’t want to. He could say that Ed is slipping through his fingers like wind and he doesn’t know how to hold on to him the way he needs to. He could say that he doesn’t know how to be casual and easy, which is what Ed insists this is.

He could say he’s sorry.

Instead, he swallows that, too.

The movie resumes playing as Ed gets to his knees. Stede’s heart jumps like he’s been defibrillated. It’s what he wants. And still, he feels sick.

“Mm,” Ed says. He takes his time, always. When the positions are reversed, Stede feels greedy, clumsy, a toddler smashing birthday cake. He takes Ed until he chokes, every time, and Ed chuckles lovingly, pets his hair. He is aware, when he gets to touch Ed, of the timer. It counts down and down and down, and Stede tries not to remember how it feels when it gets to zero.

There is nothing to do in the meantime but take as much as he can.

Ed, though, seems, if not unaware of the timer, at least unfazed by its ticking. He takes his time when it suits him and hurries when he wants to feel smug.

The movie, too, races toward its end. When it gets there, Stede will retreat to his room and stay awake all night, reliving every second of this. Ed, he imagines, will sleep the calm, easy sleep of the blameless.

Ed pins Stede’s legs with his elbows, he works his tongue, the flat broad warmth of it, slow up the underside of Stede’s shaft. He uses the laser-precise tip under the head where it burns. He moans as he presses down. He works his way back up, sucking hard.

There are moments (this is one) in which Stede can’t understand what he’s doing. Why he is sabotaging his present happiness for an unknowable future. Why he can’t override the fear mechanism and go with it—the parties, the chaos, the relationship with the man he already loves.

Why he’s hurting himself to protect himself from getting hurt.

Ed’s fingers dig into his thighs.

“f*ck, Ed, I love this,” is what he says. It’s true but it’s not the whole truth, and it’s not nothing but the truth either.

Ed pauses long enough to hike Stede’s jeans and underwear down to his ankles, freeing Stede one foot at a time. The gesture is tender and intimate, fingers brushing his sole, and Stede wants to cry. His eyes slam shut so he won’t have to think about the timer, their proximity to zero. He feels the wet heat of Ed’s mouth return. He feels Ed’s hands, adjusting his thighs. He can’t breathe.

Ed presses a single slick finger to Stede’s asshole and all the air goes electric. Inside him, a whoosh like the embers catching, like a key in the lock, turning, like the end of the world. He sucks in a breath, gathers Ed’s hair into a loose ponytail in his hands, combing through it with his fingers, and tries to breathe through it as Ed’s eyes roll back into his head. It’s too late though, he’s close, the feeling is too new, too intense, like Ed plucked it straight from his subconscious, dreamed it into fullness. The characters on the television say serious, dramatic words. The mottled light hits the side of Ed’s face, shows the contour of his cheekbone, his jawline, the pain in his eyes. Stede wills himself to remember this moment, remember that you never know when it’s the good old days, remember it when the timer gets to zero.

Stede comes, wailing. He feels dizzy, drunk.

Ed wipes his mouth, stands, unfastens his jeans. Ed plucks his Nokia from his pocket—does he check the time, or a text?—and drops it to the coffee table. Stede’s still gasping as Ed presses his co*ck into Stede’s mouth with a wicked smile. He is still too gone to be anything but calm and pliant, and Ed likes it.

“Oh, f*ck yeah, just like that,” Ed says, thrusting gently, hand on the back of Stede’s head still hot. “Yeah. f*ck.”

He wonders if Ed ever wants the way that Stede wants. Does Ed ever feel like the hole inside him could swallow the sun? That he can make and remake himself and never be enough? Does Ed want, as Stede does, to grab Stede by the shoulders and scream into his face that they could have everything if he would just shut the hell up and let himself be happy?

The movie goes to commercial, and the nasal voice selling detergent is too loud. Ed’s cell buzzes on the table. A short one, a text, Stede has learned. This is why he hates coming first, his head takes over. Thinks about all the things this isn’t.

He makes a noise to pull off, let Ed answer it. “No, pet, not yet,” Ed says, hand firm in his hair, and Stede’s co*ck gives a weak jump. He whines for Ed.

It buzzes again. The commercial is selling a car now, some huge thing racing around a winding mountain road. Ed comes with a grunt, folding over, both hands on Stede’s head.

“f*ck, Stede,” he says.

There’s a sharp knock at the door, and everything evaporates. Ed’s tucked and straightened and smoothed in record time. Stede’s only just got his jeans buttoned as Ed yanks the door open. He’s still out of breath.

“Jesus, Ed, you can’t answer a text?” Izzy breezes in, phone in hand. “I told you, it would be—ah, f*ck’s sake, the whole place smells like sex, have some self-respect.”

Ed laughs. “Our f*ckin’ apartment, Iz.”

“Yeah, well, I told you to be ready, that record company party is a whole f*ckin’ scavenger hunt, we gotta start at some coffee cart downtown, there’ll be an address on the inside of the f*ckin’ cup holder thing, keeps your hands from getting burnt.”

“Java jackets,” Stede supplies. He and Ed used to laugh whenever they showed up on the inventory sheet at Minty’s.

“No f*ckin’ way they’re called that,” Izzy shoots back. “Idiot.”

Stede throws his hands up, exasperated. “Well, I’m sorry, but they are.”

“That’s stupid,” Ed says. “Who’s drinking coffee at ten at night? Even I know that’s insane.”

“Keeps the riff raff out.”

“Thought we were the riff raff.”

Ed fwumps down onto a chair, head lolled back. Stede knows what he wants. He wants to crawl back onto the couch. He wants to have a beer while another stupid old movie plays. He wants Stede to rub at his scalp while he falls asleep early.

Anyway, that’s what Stede wants. He’s always conflating the two. That’s how they got here. That’s why it’s ruined.

“As I keep f*ckin’ telling you, you’re not the riff raff, you’re the wide-eyed ingenue who is going to show up and take your little blurry photos with a girl on one arm and a guy on the other so everyone can argue in the comments about which one of them sucked your dick in the bathroom and you’ll drink the sh*tty sponsored tequila and then write up a post that makes it all sound ten times more wild and romantic and exciting than it ever could be and the day after it drops you’ll get a hundred new invites to even gimmickier parties with stupider people plus fifteen new sponsors and ten boxes of free sh*t in the mail, which is the f*ckin’ bargain you made with the devil when you decided to start a f*ckin’ party girl blog. So get your stupid impractical stompy boots on and let’s go.”

Izzy, too, sounds exhausted, and Stede wonders why they’re doing this if neither of them seem to enjoy it.

“Yeah, yeah” Ed says, scrubbing hands down his face, already defeated.

Stede knows he will go. He also knows he is not invited.

“You only get invited if you f*ckin’ show up. Fix your eyeliner, and let’s go before cinderella here turns back into a pumpkin.”

“That’s not how—”

“And don’t forget your sh*tty camera.”

It takes about three minutes for the timer to reach zero. The door slams unceremoniously. Stede hears their voices fading down the stairs. He hears the front gate bang shut and reverberate.

Another movie starts. He falls asleep not watching it.

When he blinks awake, hours later, he’s starving and his mouth is dry. Ed’s giggling. He hears what can only be the sound of kissing. Stede keeps his eyes shut tight.

“Jesus, Sam, f*ck—my roommate—”

Roommate.

The louvered door to Ed’s bedroom slides into place, and the unfamiliar laugh that comes from behind it is deep, raspy, masculine.

Stede clicks the TV off. He goes to his room and cries himself to sleep.

- JUNE -

The gym cut him to thirty-two hours, lopping off an entire shift. It takes his income just below the threshold for “living” and squarely into the realm of “surviving.”

The inheritance is almost gone.

He gets a second gig, covering Saturdays answering phones and checking people in at an optometrist’s office. He smiles wanly when a girl comes in for the second time that month with an eye infection. You can’t lick your contacts when they fall out, he tells her again.

She won’t listen. Nobody listens. Nobody cares. She has a mother to rely on who will pay for unlimited exams and replacement contacts.

Stede doesn’t even have vision care. He works at a f*cking optometrist and can’t get an eye exam.

being poor in this world isn’t dignified or righteous, it’s humiliation after humiliation, it’s a series of punishments from which I’m trying to spare you—

At night, alone in his room while Ed is out, Stede hears his father’s voice. He hears his father’s voice telling him poverty will crush him like a bug and he hears the timer, ticking. Forty-seven, forty-six, forty-five.

He’s sick, again. All the time.

Stress, he thinks. From picking up extra shifts covering the front desk at the gym. From eating takeout instead of cooking, from interacting with the public, from not getting enough sleep. From not enough physical activity—even with his discount, he can’t afford a membership at his own gym.

He’d hoped by this time he would be enrolled in some classes, at the community college perhaps, something, anything. Something that feels like living on purpose and not existing out of habit.

Jim is staying at their apartment, on the living room couch. Ed had informed him yesterday morning, on his way out the door to work. Ed had obviously not gone to bed yet.

Finally quit Minty’s, can you believe? They want to see the city.

Didn’t know you were still in touch with them, Stede had said, hoping his jealousy wasn’t showing (it was).

Oh yeah, they read Blackbeard, Ed had said, not looking up from his screen.

Everyone reads Blackbeard but Stede.

Stede can’t bear to, not anymore, not ever. Not since Ed started openly discussing his hook-ups.

Moments after Stede had gotten home from work, Jim had arrived, as the prophecy foretold, backpack on their shoulder, eager sparkle in their eyes. Ed wasted no time wooing them. I gotta go to this reading tonight, but after that we can go someplace cool. There’s this event downtown, a pillow fight, it gets nuts, you’ll see.

He doesn’t bother asking Stede if he wants to come anymore. That ship has sailed. Stede had said no too many times. His Nos had morphed into are you sure that’s a good ideas, and not sure it’s wise to spend money so close to the firsts. Ed got tired of his nagging.

The only reason he’d mentioned it yesterday is because he knew Stede wouldn’t fuss in front of Jim.

Stede hates that he’s right.

Now, it’s Sunday, Stede’s only day off, and it’s after noon when Ed and Jim emerge from their respective hangovers and the three of them toddle down to the diner.

“Supposed to be the best breakfast in the neighborhood,” Ed says, popping the battery into his camera as they wait by the door, as though breakfast isn’t breakfast but a notch in his bedpost.

Ed orders for the table. Stede gets a bagel with some veg on it and can’t believe it’s seven dollars. The two of them get a feast. Waffles with a side of bacon for Ed, eggs benedict and a short stack for Jim.

The diner is busy but the food comes fast. In the silence of everyone eating, Stede notices that the radio plays Ginuine’s Pony. Stede feels ashamed every time the song says ‘horny.’

It’s been weeks since Ed’s touched him, even in friendship, even in passing. He hugs the wall when they pass in the hallway. And who can blame him? Stede is irritable and anxious and exhausted all the time.

Ed wants to go out and Ed wants to party and Ed, if rumors of his blog are to be believed, wants bodies of all kinds crushing up against him. He wants lust and adventure, he wants to experiment and find himself, he wants to help you find yourself in the process, he wants to try everything and go everywhere and be everyone, a thousand faces a night, half-obscured in smoke and pulsing lights, all of them Blackbeard.

And Stede just wants Ed.

There are teens at the table next to them singing, if you’re Gumby, let’s do it, ride it, my Pokey, and laughing a riot. Two years ago, he and Ed would have joined in, laughed at it for months. Now Ed doesn’t seem to notice. His mind, these days, is always on the next thing. If they’re at the park, Ed’s looking at his list to see how close they are to the next park. Hell, even now as he eats (very) late breakfast, he’s telling Jim where they’ll go for dinner.

The server checks on their orders, squats down so she doesn’t have to shout, stops mid-sentence looking at Ed.

“You look familiar, hun,” she says. “So cute with your Joe Camel thing.”

“He’s a writer,” Jim says, proud.

“Any books I’ve read?”

“Blog, actually.”

“What’s that, like, articles?”

Ed laughs it off, asks if he can take her picture. He hands her a calling card with the website on it, and Stede didn’t even know he’d had those made. She gives them 10% off the bill, just for fun. Ed picks up the whole thing, and Stede hates himself all the way down to last year’s shoes.

“I told you he was Blackbeard,” the teens next to them say, overloud on purpose, giggling.

Ed dips his sunglasses and gives a coy wave. They squeal and turn pink with glee.

“We gotta lay low tonight, amigo. I can’t keep up with you,” Jim says, permanent smirk full of absorbent carbs.

“Some spring f*ckin’ chicken you are,” Ed says.

“I dunno if anyone’s ever mentioned it, but you go HARD,” Jim says, sitting back, fork clattering. “We started at six with wine at the reading. I was sh*tfaced by the time we even got to the bar, but him? Totally unfazed. Stede, I don’t know how you keep up with him.”

“I assure you, I do not keep up with him,” Stede says. He smiles, but Ed stares at his food.

“I make everyone read Blackbeard, I’m telling you. You just capture something, man, like the feeling of being young, alive, in love.”

What Ed is in love with, Jim doesn’t say.

Back at the apartment, they hang out for a while. Ed and Jim share a joint, blowing the smoke out the front window, and Stede resists the urge to tell them they should go out back. Ed stops Jim from offering it to Stede, his job does randomized drug tests. It’s a lie, but it’s also a mercy: it keeps Stede from having to say no over and over and over again. Everyone in his life seems fine risking it all, which must be nice for them. What they forget is that it’s his name on the car title, his name on the lease. Sure, “everyone” smokes, but the rest of them don’t have Stede’s bad luck, his penchant for attracting the wrong kind of attention, his tendency to irritate even casual passersby, his pristine ability to misread any situation in which he finds himself.

At six, Izzy comes around after work. Jim takes to him instantly, and Stede wonders what the hell he’s doing wrong. Izzy does Krav Maga at a local gym in the basem*nt of a CVS, offers to take Jim along sometime.

Stede and Izzy haven’t exchanged two pleasant sentences since the day they moved in.

Stede has a glass of wine. Another. He stifles a yawn.

He watches Ed, glowing in the window, magic hour light in his tired eyes.

Archie arrives at seven, and within ten minutes, Jim is sitting in her lap so she can apply some kind of smoky makeup around Jim’s eyes. It makes Jim look meaner, sadder, and younger. She puts it on Ed too. And Frenchie, when he gets there, kalimba at the ready. With the eye makeup and his big gorgeous hair, he looks like he woke up this morning in 1978. All four of them look mean and beautiful. Ed takes a hundred photos. Stede is not in them.

Zheng and Olu show up—a proper couple now. At the last party, they’d all caught them f*cking in the bathroom when someone finally had to piss badly enough to break the door open. Fang and Ivan appear, no dog this time, saying they can’t stay long. Everyone is excited to meet Jim. We love you guys, they all say, of course you have the coolest friends.

Everyone loves them.

Everyone loves Ed. Or Blackbeard. Stede can’t tell anymore.

Stede tries, god help him, to turn his mood around. He joins everyone for a round of shots, approximates a laugh with his mouth open. There is some kind of dare, and Olu, Archie, and Jim all kiss while Zheng claps and cheers. Stede tries to picture this. Ed kissing Frenchie, or Izzy, or any of the retinue of strangers he lets take nightly residence in his not-room, while Stede claps and laughs. Maybe, he thinks, he could laugh and clap, someday. But first he would have to admit that what he wants is Ed, and not this “casual, easy” thing Ed is willing to give him after he ruined things so spectacularly on his first go-round.

First, he would have to admit that he wants Ed to come back to him, after it all.

He heads to the kitchen to open a bag of chips for everyone. Mostly, he needs a minute, just a goddamn minute.

When he comes out, there are three more people in his house that he doesn’t know. Someone has put on music, upbeat Janet Jackson, together again is all Stede hears. People are dancing. Ed is snapping pictures, laughing in the corner. One of the new people has an arm around Ed, and Ed, Stede would swear, blushes.

Stede thinks about the first party. The one that ended with the two of them on the couch, crashing into each other like collapsing stars. He thinks about the way Ed used to look at him from across the room, the way Ed used to tell people about him like he was a candy-bright strawberry suspended in the jello of Ed’s attention. He thinks about how it might have been different if Stede had been able to say everything locked down beneath the glacier of fear inside him.

“Stand in the window,” Ed’s saying to the new person as she lights a one-hitter. “Stede doesn’t like the smoke.”

That’s how Ed talks about him now. Like a dour overseer. Like a mother.

Archie and Jim are on either side of Olu on the couch. They’re making out across him, hands on each other’s faces, smile playing at the corner of Jim’s mouth. It catches, and the girl on Ed’s arm presses her lithe body against him. Ed’s got an arm around her tiny waist. Stede wants to shove her out the bay window but only after he turns off the music so that he might hear the crunch of her bones.

Stede goes into his room and closes the door behind him. He opens a paperback and reads the same page ten times. He flops onto his side, places his head between two pillows, and forces himself to meditate on each word, until sentences begin to take shape. He manages to pass some time.

Ed does not come to check on him.

When he comes out to use the bathroom a few hours later, the music is much louder. Jim has their backpack on their shoulder, and they’re being carried out the door on Archie’s back. Frenchie is humming a tune to the girl Ed was kissing before as she falls asleep on the couch. The whole place smells like pot.

Ed is vomiting in the kitchen sink. Izzy rubs his back, laughing.

Ed turns briefly, sensing him. He looks absolutely miserable. Like the drunkenness has brought out some deeper level of unexplored sadness and his body is rejecting itself right there on top of the dirty dishes.

Every molecule in Stede’s body tells him to go to Ed. To scream at everyone to get the hell out, to hip-check Izzy out of the damn way and hold Ed’s hair back and help him gently to the shower, make him toast, put him to bed where he belongs, hold him while he cries it out.

But he doesn’t FEEL it. He doesn’t feel anything. He feels only a tired, vaguely irritated nothing.

Stede brushes his teeth. He washes his face. He locks the door to his room, and shoves his full laundry basket in front of it—not that it will do anything. He places his lavender-scented sleep mask over his eyes and tries to drown it all out.

- SEPTEMBER -

On his way to the kitchen, Stede passes Ed coming out of his nook with a camera the size of a newborn. He holds it by the enormous lens, like he’s already a pro.

“Wow, that’s quite an instrument you’ve got there,” Stede says. “Must have cost an arm and a leg, no?”

“I can afford it,” Ed mutters, not looking.

“Did you take it out of the inheritance?” Stede says, something dangerous breaking free from containment, alarms blaring. The inheritance is down to three digits, most of it having vanished covering the past two months’ rent, after the optometrist let him go when the normal Saturday receptionist came back from parental leave.

Ed eyes him. “And what if I did?”

“Well, I think I’d have a right to know, don’t you? It won’t last forever, you know.”

“Yes, thank you, I’m aware of math, Stede,” he says. There’s an edge to his voice, but he looks down at his new camera, fiddling. “Anyway, what happened to it’s ours?”

“It’s ours to live off, Ed, not to buy toys with.”

Stede sounds, he realizes with blooming horror, exactly like his father.

“Toys,” Ed repeats.

And—just like his father—he doesn’t back down.

“Yes, Ed, toys. I’m working two jobs right now, in case you hadn’t noticed, and I—”

“Oh, I’ve f*ckin’ noticed, Stede. Everyone’s f*ckin’ noticed because you won’t shut up about how hard it is, how tired you are. Sorry your job f*ckin’ sucks, Stede. Sorry mine doesn’t.”

“Ed, stop this, you don’t have a job.”

“Oh, I don’t? What the f*ck do I spend my time doing then?”

“Well, it seems to me like you spend your time gallivanting around town drinking and partying.”

“Yeah, well. Sorry I’m so much fun they pay me for it.”

“Maybe so, Ed, but you don’t cook, you don’t clean this place, you don’t get the oil changed in the car you use freely and at your leisure. What kind of life is that? I thought we came here to live like grown-ups, Ed, take care of ourselves, each other, and you refuse to—”

He slams the camera down onto their little table.

“You know what Stede, I took care of my parents my whole f*cking life, maybe I don’t wanna take care of anyone right now. Maybe I need a f*cking break.”

“So, what, I’m supposed to just take care of everything? Both of us? That hardly seems fair.”

“By taking care of us, you mean worrying and f*ckin’ complaining? Nagging constantly, even though I twist myself into f*cking pretzels to keep from bothering you? Even though no matter how much I do you always find some other f*ckin’ little scab to pick?”

“One of us has to worry, Ed! One of us has to try to make this work!”

“Oh yeah? That’s what you’re doing, making this work? Bitching at me about buying a camera—which I NEED—when you’re out there spending f*cking forty bucks on hair gel?”

“That hair gel, that—that’s grooming! That’s why I have a real job, Ed!”

“I have a real f*ckin’ job, too, Stede! Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not real. You know, Izzy says that by next year—”

“Oh, Izzy says, Izzy says, that’s rich. Is Izzy making sure we have toilet paper? Does he restock your rum when you’re out, Ed?”

“Of course, it’s always about money with you. I should have f*ckin’ known. For all you f*ckin’ hated it you’re just as consumed by it as everyone else.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Ed, but I didn’t think we’d be living like this forever! I thought by now—”

He stops himself. There is real hurt on Ed’s face. He doesn’t even know what he’s saying, he’s just so mad, he’s so tired, he has to go, he has to—

Ed steps in front of him. Narrows his eyes.

“By now what, Stede? Say it.”

He shouldn’t say it. He should apologize, excuse himself, take a long shower, eat something, anything but stand here and hurt the man he loves.

He doesn’t.

“You said you wanted to get your GED Ed, you said you wanted to, to go to school for writing. And what are you doing?”


“I’m f*cking writing is what I’m doing.”

“Well, yes, but it’s not—”

“Don’t you dare say it’s not real.”

“Well I’m going to if you PUSH me! Nobody even knows what a blog IS, Ed! A blog isn't a career, it's a, it's a whim, Ed, you're whim-prone.”

“I churn out two thousand words a day. Posts get hundreds of comments, my photos get used in the f*ckin’ news, advertisers are—you know what? I don’t have to justify it to you. I’m sorry I don’t give a sh*t about a piece of paper that says I’m allowed to do the job I’m already f*cking doing, and I’m sorry you can’t see me for what I am, but I am living my f*cking dream, Stede. I’m writing, and I’m making good f*cking money at it, better than you are answering phones for some empty f*ckin’ suit. It was never gonna be Minty’s forever, no matter how much you wanna keep me wearing the matching goddamn uniforms, so f*ck you, okay? This is me now. You know, the worst f*ckin’ part is that I would happily cover your rent if you could humble yourself and just f*ckin’ ask me, but you won’t, because you have to be better at everything, gotta, gotta f*ckin’ know everything. Well, I’m sorry, okay, I’m sorry you gotta mooch—and for more than just a sloppy Saturday night hookup for once.”

“That’s because I don’t want to rely on f*cking Blackbeard, okay? I don’t like who you are when you’re Blackbeard. I want to rely on ED, and I don’t know where he is anymore!” Stede’s voice breaks, full of glass, pleading. “What happened to you, Ed? Where did you go?”

Something changes in Ed’s face.

“You don’t want to ask me that.”

Ed goes to leave, but Stede grabs his shoulder. Ed wrenches away.

“Ed, please. Just talk to me.”

“That’s what this is about? Because I won’t f*ckin’ tell you what happened that night?”

Stede pinches the bridge of his nose in frustration. It is about that but it isn’t, and he doesn’t even know why he’s mad, he doesn’t even hate Ed’s lifestyle, doesn’t even think his job is fake, it’s just all so hard, so hard every day, and his feelings are so big and he is so impotent against them, and there must be someone in this world who can tell him how he’s supposed to live, and—

“I killed my father.”

“What?” His vision blurs and his legs turn jelly and the room is hot, so hot and Ed? Ed is ice cold.

“You need to know so bad? Fine. He was sh*tfaced. I got tired of watching him harass my mother. I told him to get the f*ck out of the house, and he did, and then he wrapped his pretty little pickup around a f*cking light pole, and ma? She told me to get gone. So that’s,” he picks up his camera, stuffs it in his bag as punctuation, “where Ed went.”

Stede takes a step toward Ed and Ed recoils like he just touched a hot stove.

“This is the thing,” Ed says, fingertips to his temple, “this is the reason I didn’t wanna do this with you. You don’t get it, Stede, you don’t get what it’s like to not have a net. It means you have to make choices, you have to know who you are and what you’re doing because if you don’t, you believe the lie, you believe the system will find a way for you. It won’t, Stede. It never will. But it’s always been there for people like you, so you cling to it, you f*cking hold on for dear life—you won’t admit you’re queer in case it holds you back, you worry about money all the f*cking time even when you have it, you spend your one wild and precious life yelling at me about how I put the f*ckin’ toothpaste away … two years ago Stede would hate this Stede, Stede.”

Ed picks up his leather jacket off the chair—Blackbeard’s jacket. The door opens, and the door closes.

And then Stede is alone.

Two hours later and Stede’s sitting in a dingy break room, waiting for an interview at a call center for a pharmaceutical company. It’s a last resort of last resorts, the job that is so intolerable that its listing never disappears from the craigslist boards. He has managed to pull himself together mostly, but his eyes are red and his hands shake, resume and cover letter rustling with the beat of his heart. He feels weak, jumpy. He can’t think of a single thing to say on his own behalf in order to get this job. He doesn’t even fully understand why he’s sitting in the creaky folding chair or how he got there.

Habit.

And because the lease is up in two weeks and he can’t renew it if he can’t afford to keep paying it going forward.

And now he certainly can’t ask Ed for help.

The door opens and he nearly bursts into tears.

“Stede Bonnet? I saw your name on the calendar and thought there was no way it could be … and yet, here you are.”

Chauncey Badminton enunciates the last three words as though each is a formal indictment and Stede wishes he could slink under the molding and slither into the floorboards like whatever species of vermin he is.

Chauncey laughs, a sickening sound, big and stupid. He sits opposite Stede at the tiny table.

“And you want to work for me.”

“Well. Yes, I suppose, much as I want to work anywhere.”

That awful, nasal laugh. “Brilliant start, Bonnet.”

Stede should get up. He should stand with his legs that will definitely work and he should get in his car and go somewhere, anywhere else. There are dozens of reasons he should do this, but chief among them is that Chauncey is enjoying this far too much.

“Go on, then. Tell me why on earth I should hire you.”

“Because. Because, well, I, I work hard, and I’m. You know, timely, and—”

“I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but I know it was you.”

“Sorry?”

“Do you know how I got stuck running this hellhole for my father?”

“Well, the articles say I’m meant to be interviewing you as well, and I dare say you’re not selling the position,” Stede sneers, too tired to even sound bitchy. He braces himself to stand and go.

“My brother,” Chauncey snarls, slamming a fist on the table, shocking Stede back into place. “That’s why I’m here. Because he lost his mind that night at Minty’s, the night he insists he was contacted by a,” air quotes, “ghost, but I know that ghost was you, Stede Bonnet. I know it was you because that,” air quotes, “ghost, somehow knew all about the row boat incident. You may have broken him, but you have not broken me, Stede Bonnet.”

“I—I don’t know what you mean, we didn’t even work at the same—”

“You ruined him. You ruined his head and you ruined his brain. He can’t hold a job, couldn’t graduate, can’t do anything, walks around muttering how everything he does hurts someone. All the money went to his care, and so here I am, interviewing you, Stede Bonnet. You ruined him and you ruined me, and it won’t be long until you ruin that roommate of yours.”

Stede blinks, mouth open.

“That’s right. I know about Blackbeard. I can guess what you two get up to in that, it’s a one bedroom apartment you share, isn’t it? What’s it like to be with someone so much more interesting than you? Must drive you mad. It must be miserable, begging for scraps of attention from the man who used you to get his start. That’s how it went, right? I heard all about it from Minty’s. He wrapped you around his little finger, and you rescued him like the handsome prince you are, only to have him drop you the instant he got popular.”

There is a buzzing noise in Stede’s head, growing louder by the second. He doesn’t think he could take a breath if he tried. The only thing that matters is getting out of that room. He shoves the table, and Chauncey goes down, but he doesn’t wait to see if he’s okay.

When Stede comes to, he is flying down the interstate, only road ahead and revenge behind him. It’s dark outside, wipers squeaking against the windshield in the light drizzle. The trunk is full of clothes and the tank is half full and he left the last $823 of the inheritance on the kitchen table.

He hopes that when Ed sees it, he’ll know Stede loves him.

Chapter 3: starting from zero

Chapter Text

YEAR THREE

- DECEMBER -

The basem*nt is freezing, all the time. Damp, too.

His mother turned his room into a closet as soon as he was gone. Entire wall lined with meticulously color-coded dresses, all of which she would likely wear twice at the most before donating. And still, they’d earned more real estate than him.

He’d stood there in the doorway, mouth open in shock, trying to avoid the eye of his own gaunt reflection in the absurdly oversized mirror leaning against the place his desk used to be. It smelled like gardenias from the little diffuser in the corner and mothballs from, well, the mothballs, like a funeral parlor.

It’s not that he harbored particularly fond feelings for the room. It was a box to contain him, like any other. It’s just that the world seemed to have a habit of painting over evidence of his presence the second he walked out of frame.

It’s fine. On the list of indignities in his life it barely ranked. Humbling himself wasn’t an official condition of his return to his father’s house—and there were plenty of those—but it might as well have been.

He’d moved into the basem*nt. It was finished, at least, albeit twenty years ago. The windows opened a little and the paneling was hideous and the toilet ran constantly and it was always dark, which was perfect because all he wanted to do was sleep. No amount was enough. He’d wake around ten and have to sit up to keep from nodding back off. He’d drag himself into the world for a few hours, check things off his father’s list of mandatory tasks until he couldn’t stand it anymore, at which point he would hobble back down the stairs, lie down to “rest” for five minutes, and wake up an hour later. After that, he always felt better, because only a few more hours of miserable consciousness would be required of him before it became socially acceptable to slink back down to his always unfolded futon and conk out until his presence was once again required in the world of the living.

Other conditions: no Minty’s. No menial jobs at all, in fact, only college applications, essays, scholarships, letters of recommendation. The process felt like its own full time job, especially because he didn’t want to be doing it. It all seemed pointless after everything he’d seen.

After all, Ed had been right about everything. He saw it now.

It had nothing to do with hard work or gumption or SAT scores or any of it. What a person could get out of this world was dependent solely upon what one already had, and what Stede had now was a house to live in for free, a father to bark instructions about the tedious order of operations involved in ”making something” of himself, the proper Empty Shirts to beg for letters extolling his virtues who all knew the right buzz words to apply to their endorsem*nts, and, perhaps most of all, the time, space, and resources required for a person who’d thrown it all away to start again from nothing.

Ed did not have those things.

And yet: Ed had done something much more remarkable. He’d managed to forge a path through this world using nothing but his brilliant mind, his tenacious work ethic, his powers of observation and empathy, and a thrift store digital camera.

With some distance, some time, Stede’s in awe.

If only he could have appreciated it. If only he could have accepted his own cluelessness, his own inferiority, embraced the chaos of the lifestyle, been excited instead of jealous and bitter. He could be there, still, by Ed’s side. Could be his stylist, maybe, helping him choose outfits to maximize attention, dressing him in vintage finds from around the city—he’d be pretty good at that, he thinks. He’d be anything Ed needed, though, whatever it was. His personal assistant. His housecleaner. His chauffeur.

Anything to be near him again.

He’d been so stupid.

He ought to have humbled himself, like Ed said. He thought he had been, by staying quiet and out of the way, by taking care of the chores, by grinding his teeth to dust to trap the worry inside him. Or, that’s what he told himself, anyway.

In reality, he’d been constitutionally unable to accept that Ed didn’t need Stede to save him from anything. All he’d needed was money—and not even a lot, just enough for lift off. A car, a lease, basic necessities met, and boom, Ed was way up in the stratosphere.

And Stede couldn’t stand being looked down upon.

That was his crucial error.

Because Ed never had looked down upon him, not really. He’d only extended a hand to lift him up. It’s just that nobody who’d ever had power over him had done so before, and he didn’t trust it—hell, he hadn’t even seen it. All he saw was Ed thriving while he floundered, and it made him act as though Ed had left him behind, right up until the prophecy had fulfilled itself.

It’s almost funny to check Ed’s blog now, an activity he endures daily. All the entries look and feel different, just a kid exploring the world, an open heart and mind and a keen eye for details and a bit of bravado to ease the way. It was never the treatise on how Stede ought to be living he always assumed Ed meant it to be. It was never a comparison at all. It was simply Ed at arm’s distance, obscured by a hell of a strong narrative voice, making some money and having some fun, getting away from his churlish roommate and the guilt and grief of all the tragedy back home.

And Stede had shamed him.

Cruel. Pathetic.

A sentiment with which his father would doubtless agree. His father hates him, no question, but there is a kind of relief to his clear and direct hatred. No guessing. Stede knows how to survive it. He was forged by it, after all. It’s natural, more or less rote at this point, fighting it would be like trying to fight the rain. It’s much easier to bathe in it, even as it weighs him down, even as it fills his open maw, drowning him.

--

“Pete! Hello there!”

Pete finally looks up from the monitor. He’s the only one Stede recognizes now, all his former colleagues having been flung off to their respective colleges as though the doors of the Graviton had been ripped off mid-ride.

“Stede, man, hey, uhh. What’s up? You visiting?”

“Oh, no, no. I’m uhh. I’m back! Gap year’s over. Set to start school in the spring, so. Here I am!”

“Gap year? But … but you left with Blackbeard. I thought you were finally getting out of this sh*t hole for good, leaving it all behind, forging—"

“Oh, nooo, no no, pfft. That’s not important, is it? Boring claptrap about my life, hah hah, what’s more important is how YOU are, my friend, the old alma mater treating you well?”

“Who’s Alma? Is that someone who used to work here?”

Stede can feel the rodent face coming on.

“No, I meant, I mean—" god, is this what it was like trying to make friends before Ed? “—I mean how’s the gig treating you, Pete? The job. Minty’s.”

“Oh! I f*cking hate this place.”

“Right.”

“Do you … I mean are you gonna order anything?”

“No, erm. No, I came in to see if you maybe wanted to get coffee? Or something? Dinner? Catch up sometime?”

Pete shifts from his right foot to his left and back again. His eyes narrow.

“Why?”

“Because we were, you know. We were friends.”

“We were?”

Stede forces his face to smile, forces the air from his lungs.

“Let me be clearer. Pete, I moved back home, and I don’t have anyone to hang out with at present, and since were formerly acquainted and I recall enjoying your company, I am wondering if you’d like to go to the coffee shop in town and have a catch up with me, perhaps on your next day off.”

“My next day off is Friday, but I have a dentist’s appointment—"

“Oh for f*ck’s sake—THE SUBSEQUENT DAY OFF, THEN.”

“Yeah sure, man, that sounds … fun.”

Stede produces his new cell phone—another tether, thank you father—from his coat pocket and punches Pete’s number in. Cell phones are evidently forbidden on the Minty’s sales floor, and so Stede scribbles his own down on a little scrap of receipt paper and slides it back across the counter.

“I’ll text you,” Pete says suspiciously.

God, Stede hates texting.

- MARCH -

“Oh, Jesus, sorry, here let me—oh!”

He’d been in the library reading Moby Dick, a book nobody had assigned but one which delighted him so much he couldn’t stop rolling around in its decadent quirky excesses. He’d realized about five minutes past the time he could have done anything to prevent it that he was late for his next class, and off he’d shot. He’d come careening around the corner like his hair was on fire and crashed straight into a person he hadn’t seen because she was a full head shorter than him.

Moby Dick thuds to the ground.

“Stede! I didn’t know you went here!”

“Mary?”

She seems, against all logic, genuinely happy to see him. Her smile is crooked and sincere, her eyes glitter. She holds two books pressed to her chest, and it draws his attention to her outfit. She’s not dressed like everyone else here in their flannel pajamas and hoodies, jeans with bare midriffs. She’s in grey plaid bell bottoms with a vintage silk blouse, puss* bow hanging loose at her throat. A black bow in her hair matches her black pointed toe flats and pulls the whole look together—easy, elegant, timeless. Unique. She even smells refined.

“I didn’t know you did either,” he says, awash in the relief of a friendly face.

“Well,” she says, “you seem in a hurry, I should probably—"

“Oh, gosh, no, sorry, you surprised me is all—here, please,” he says, pulling out a chair, gesturing for her to sit at the table he’d just evacuated. “I was on my way to class. But I was already late. And I didn’t really want to go."

Mary laughs. She settles into the chair with a luminous smile and crosses her legs neatly. There is a tightness about her, a spring wound up and clamped that way, and Stede finds it familiar and comforting. Her movements are deliberate and intentional. Her speed not too fast or slow. She is not ashamed to look him in the eyes, not afraid to be seen. He is fascinated. He has a strange impulse to study her, major in her.

He sits opposite her, drags his heavy chair across the carpet awkwardly until he gives up and has to sit too far from the table.

“What are you doing here? I thought for sure you’d be in a high-walled Ivy somewhere, studying some bespoke niche topic for geniuses I’ve never heard of.”

The college is fine, a local well-regarded Jesuit thing with a strong humanities core mostly attended by out-of-towners studying nursing that Stede chose because it was within driving distance and he did not have the energy to relocate his body and possessions a third time. He is studying English Literature, because he thought he’d hate it the least and that his father would hate it the most (he did), but he doesn’t care overmuch. He’s only here as a condition of his imprisonment. After this, he will take the LSAT and he will perform well and the machine that turns him into a patent attorney at his father’s firm will whir steadily until its mission is complete. All Stede has to do is not fail, and short of coming in and taking the exams for him, his father has all but ensured he won’t.

But Mary? Mary was brilliant, bright, a lead in the play, a designer on the yearbook, a serious contender for valedictorian, a supernova at their high school. She had no business in a dumpy middling academy such as this.

“Wow, you sound just as disappointed as my parents,” she says, dry as sauvignon blanc with a smirk twice as crisp.

Her deadpan, her sense of humor, her self-deprecating. He gets along with her because she’s a lot like Ed.

Shame twists his stomach. He shoves it down.

“Oh, sorry, that was a joke,” she says, sensing his discomfort. “Well, not the part about my parents being disappointed, but. I know you meant it as a compliment.”

“No, no, sorry,” he says, blinking back to life, “I was thinking about my parents, you know, they’re erm. Pretty disappointed in me, too.”

“Yeah, you took a year off, didn’t you? I thought I heard that somewhere.”

“Yes! Yes. Year and a half, actually. Lived in the city, tried to get my bearings.”

“And have you?” she asks, tilt of her head, dry as the desert, knowing.

“May have lost a few more of them in the process, actually,” he says, and she laughs, and it feels good to make someone laugh about his misery. Laughter is sparse in his life, these days. Since—well.

“But really,” he says, “why here?”

She looks away. “Stupid really. A guy.”

Well, we have that in common, he thinks.

“Oh! Is it serious?”

“Well, I thought it was! His, erm. Apparently existing fiancee, however, disagreed with me.”

“Oh, Mary, I’m so sorry. How awful.”

“No no, honestly. It’s embarrassing, more than anything. I should have realized we only ever hung out in his car. Anyway, it was months ago now. I think it turned out to be for the best? If I’d have kept on the path my parents wanted me on, I’d be studying medicine and hating my life. I managed to sort of stumble into a fine arts major here, and once my parents let up with the, you know, wailing, teeth-gnashing, rending of garments, I realized I quite liked it. I’ll probably be broke for the rest of my life, but hey, you never know, maybe I’ll marry rich.”

It’s obviously a joke, but there is determination in the tense set of her mouth, in her posture, her poise. She will succeed, Stede thinks. She will get everything she wants in this life.

“Anyone would be lucky to have you,” Stede says.

She flushes, smiles, looks down, and Stede realizes what he’s just said might be construed as flirting. He did mean it, but perhaps not in that way, although Stede’s never sure. Maybe he was, maybe that’s what flirting is. Maybe flirting is just saying kind things that you mean.

Regardless, there’s an odd new power to being able to make people feel good, one he wasn’t aware he’d possessed until now. One he wants to keep exercising.

“sh*t,” she says, checking her watch. “Forgot I’m supposed to be meeting Evelyn downstairs.”

“Oh, gosh, of course,” he says.

He stands. She stands.

She waits, because she can tell he wants to say something. And he’s promised himself he’ll stop holding everything back.

“Mary, I—I’m glad I ran into you. This year … hasn’t been easy, and I’ve been a bit lonely. It lifted my spirits to see a friendly face. Your friendly face specifically, I mean.”

She smiles again, with a tinge of suspicion, or nervousness, something, the beginnings of a wince.

“Are you free on Friday? My friend Evelyn, she’s in a band, and I was thinking of going to see her show. It’s at nine, at a little venue in town?”

Cold fear slices through Stede. He may be thick, but she is absolutely asking him on a date. And the idea of dating feels like a direct betrayal to Ed, a declaration that he’s moved on. Even if Ed had moved on long before Stede had even realized what he’d been moving on from. And—good god—he hadn’t meant to flirt with her, he was just being friendly!

“Sure!” he says, overly jubilant. “Mind if I bring my friend Pete? We already had plans.”

“Oh, well, I don’t want you to break your plans,” she says, face falling, confusion knitting her brow.

“No no, not—not FIRM plans, you know, loose ones, like, we had planned to make plans, you see, and you’ve just given us perfect plans! Perfect. Just, just text me the details and I’ll be there! WE will be there, I mean.”

He clears his throat twice as he digs his phone out of the farthest reaches of his backpack. It takes a full minute for his trembling fingers to recognize the shape of it.

“Well,” she says, looking as uncertain as he feels. “Okay then.”

“Friday!”

“Friday.”

She turns to go. As he walks to class lost in thoughts—what to wear, how to convince Pete, whether he should just cancel now—beneath it all, a dagger stabs him, in and out so quick he almost misses it.

There is a tiny part of him, a sliver of broken glass, sun glinting off the edge, that WANTS to betray Ed.

It is speaking to him. He stands in a ream of sun to listen.

See Ed?, it says. I go out. I’m normal, I have friends, people want me. They want to be around me. I can see bands and go to bars and drink and f*ck and I can do it responsibly, Ed, and I don’t have to show my ass to the whole world because I don’t need the approval of every goddamn stranger on the internet to know who I am, it says.

f*ck you, Ed, it says.

He’ll go, then.

--

Pete is a mystifying person, Stede’s learned over the past weeks. His crystal clear simplicity belies something much more guarded, more knowing. He seems to be a deeply observant person who lacks any sort of normal human curiosity about the things he observes. After some cajoling, he agrees to come on Friday if Stede pays for drinks at the bar up to the amount of money he would have made working the Minty’s shift he has to call out of to do it, but he doesn’t ask a single question about why Stede is so desperate to have a companion for this outing in particular. In return, Stede does not point out that it would only total about $40 after tax.

“What do you MEAN that’s the venue,” Pete says, yanking Stede’s sleeve.

“I mean that’s the venue, it’s—what on earth, would you let go of me?”

“You brought us here ON TIME?” Pete says angrily. “Only LOSERS show up on time, man, what is wrong with you?”

“Hello, Stede,” Mary’s voice chimes from behind him—right on time.

“Mary! Hello! This is my friend Pete I was telling you about. He’s, erm. Nicer than he seems,” Stede says, shooting Pete a look.

“Oh, I see what’s going on here,” Pete says, ignoring Mary entirely. “You needed me to tag along because you were too scared to ask her out on a date.”

“Opposite, actually,” Mary says, smiling blandly. She looks beautiful, Stede notices with the half of his brain not drowning in cortisol: red dress, vintage earrings, flats. “I asked him out on a date and he panicked. Stede, Pete, this is Lucius. He’s sort of dating the bassist in Eve’s band.”

Lucius is observing the scene like a lion watching a herd of gazelle from a bush.

“Fascinating,” he whispers to no one.

“Okay,” Pete says, “wingman I can handle. Bribing me to hang out with you? Fine—I have a price like everyone else. But USING me? To AVOID getting laid? Come on, man. Not cool.”

Pete stalks toward the doors and all Stede can do is stare at his shoes.

“Yeah, I’m gonna—sorry,” Lucius says, and takes off after Pete.

“Fine. Go,” Mary says, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“Well,” Stede says. “I guess I’m off the hook for buying him $40 worth of beer.”

“Wow, that’s what he thinks his time is worth? He’s gotta learn to charge more. You certainly seemed desperate enough.”

Stede can feel himself sweating. He wills himself to stop and it only makes him sweat harder.

How does Ed do it, he wonders. Out every night, meeting people, making conversation, connecting, romantically or otherwise. Once again, Stede had underestimated the skill and fortitude it must take. Stede couldn’t even see one outing to its completion without bungling it horrendously, and in the process probably deeply offending someone who was only trying to do him a kindness. Awful. She’ll probably leave, now, or ask him to, and it’ll be another night licking his wounds, reading Ed’s blog, grinding his teeth—

“What was that about, anyway? Your little panic.” Mary smiles as she asks, like she isn’t mad.

And he could tuck his tail and run. He could. This could end right now and he could go back to circling the drain, thinking about what could have been. Or—

“Well,” Stede says. “Why don’t I tell you over a drink?”

She sticks her arm out with a cheeky grin, and he loops his in hers, and for that moment anyway, the humiliation vanishes. She feels something like a coconspirator. And, again, already, he is grateful to her.

Mary has been listening rapt as Stede tells the story. Or most of it, anyway. He leaves the more intimate bits aside, figuring they’re in mixed company, and that he doesn’t know whether Ed would want him sharing. This is what he tells himself. He does not remind himself that Ed tells everything to the whole world every day of his life.

Pete and Lucius wander over just as he gets to the punchline.

“Sorry, sorry—your roommate was BLACKBEARD?”

Mary pauses a sip mid-motion and even the ambient roar of the crowded bar seems to dull in deference to Ed’s presence in the conversation.

“Wait wait,” Lucius says across the wobbly round pub table they’re all standing around, “you mean Blackbeard, as in Blackbeard’s Revenge Blackbeard?”

“Yeah,” Pete says, “we were all best friends back in the day. Had some crazy adventures with that guy.”

“Mm, yes,” Stede says. They overlapped one shift a week and Stede would bet twice Pete’s friendship-for-hire rate that Ed would not remember his name if he saw a photograph.

“But he never mentioned you,” Lucius says, watching him closely. “Unless—unless … oh my god, you’re the roommate! From before he moved last year!”

Stede knows OF the move. Reading the entry (and seeing the accompanying photos of Izzy hauling boxes and laughing) had felt like wailing on his own balls with a hammer. He’d stopped reading for a while after that, except for when he was very drunk or very sad or very lonely or otherwise hating himself very much. Every time was a fresh wound. And every time it felt like keeping Ed alive, somehow.

“Hah, hah, yes, that, erm. That was me! Guilty.”

“And you left that man? On purpose? To come HERE and do THIS?” Lucius looks like he’s about to grab Stede by the shoulders and start shaking.

“For god’s sake Lucius, we weren’t married, we were only roommates! I had always planned to, you know, come back and go to college.”

There is complete silence at the table.

“What?” Stede shouts.

“Roommates,” Lucius says.

“Yes! Look, if you must know, he was very difficult to live with. He kept insane hours, he spent lavishly on, on bars and clubs and dinners and clothes and cameras, always, always going places just so he could have some cool story to tell—and when he WAS home, it was a party every night, different people all coming and going, strangers, people crashing on the couch, playing music and telling stories, making quesadillas in the toaster—not the toaster oven, mind you—"

“That all sounds amazing,” Pete says, wide-eyed, mouth open.

“Yeah I would absolutely love that,” Lucius says.

“Sounds like it would get exhausting,” Mary says, frowning (coconspirator, coconspirator), and Stede gestures at her brightly, see? SEE?

The band starts and the drinks continue and the night contracts to the music, the dancing, the drinking. It’s fine, even fun—Eve’s band (Natural Causes) is fun, a sort of goth pop-punk angry campy thing, and she’s a great front person. She wears an out-of-time prom dress, big weird sleeves in a gorgeous deep red, dirty converse sticking out of the bottom—almost a Tim Burton character come to life. Her hair is in a big blonde pile on top of her head and she sets the look off with an eye patch.

“Is that real?” Stede leans over and asks.

“I’m too scared to ask,” Mary shouts back.

His mind wanders as the band plays. If this were Stede’s blog, what would he say?

He would describe the bar as two stars out of five—a real dive. The drinks are watery and people seem to be throwing their empties straight onto the floor and the bathrooms are truly a nightmare, boasting saloon doors that cover a person from about nipple to mid-thigh and don’t even pretend to close, and the ventilation is poor and the whole place smells like old beer and sweat and that the crowd is probably larger than fire code allows for and several people are smoking joints on the dance floor and nobody seems to care—AND they all got in without being ID’d, which is working in his favor to be sure, but STILL.

But—and the realization breaks like a cloud—nobody wants to hear that. It’s tedious, it’s wet blanket behavior. People want to believe that a good time is possible, they want to believe that their life could get bigger. They want to believe in magic.

Ed’s blog gave them that.

He remembers once, early on, they’d gone to something, a street fair, Ed with his camera and Stede with his hands jammed in his pockets. It was warm, a beautiful day, and he’d gotten a sunburn. There’s no shade, he’d complained. Everything’s so expensive, even a hot dog costs six dollars. And all there is to do is buy stuff, it’s like they’re just trying to wring as much money from people as they can.

Yeah, Ed had agreed, shielding his eyes from the sun, kind of a racket.

Later, Ed had written it up, and Stede felt betrayed. Alongside a photo of someone hanging off a street sign, and a long shot of the block through a bubble someone had blown, was this passage:

There’s a perspective shift at a street fair. You stroll down the center of your street, a forbidden corridor for mortal pedestrians, and the stupid little shops seem so far away. What’s close—what’s everywhere, what you can touch—is people. All the people—your neighbors, your neighbors-of-neighbors, your neighbors-in-law, your grand-neighbors, temporary neighbors from out of town. Just bodies, taking up all the sacred space usually reserved for all the loud brutal machines of capitalism. You bump into people, you have micro-chats with them. You notice things from this new perspective—has that building always been that color? Has that sign always been crooked? Look at that round window, I never saw that before. And the person behind you looks too, and they point, and their friend looks. A child falls and three strangers help it up. A dog gets loose and someone dangles a hot dog until they can catch it in a hug. Suddenly the place you are becomes more than the place you shop and rent and survive, it’s the place you live, because it’s yours—it doesn’t belong to the cars or the shops, it belongs to you. You buy a pair of earrings that will break in three days and a shirt with sh*tty tie dye because someone made them with their hands. You buy another iced coffee—why not—and you think about the way the world could be.

And Ed was right, he’d realized, reading it. The sunburn was true and the racket was true and this, too, was true. Perfection wasn’t achievable. A frictionless existence isn’t life—it’s death.

That’s how Ed does it, he realizes, far too late. He finds the true, good things.

So, no—Ed would never complain about the fire code. He would describe Mary as luminous (true). He would describe the band as new, odd, with a crystal clear artistic vision (true). He would say that the mass of people around him was young, beautiful, loud (true), that he could feel their sweat cooling on his skin (sexy, question mark?), could hear the screaming of their hearts as they moved as one with the music (absolutely true). He would say the place smelled like every kind of life, from the fermented beer on the floor to the ji*zz on the bathroom wall, and he would be right.

Ed would snap a photo of Eve mid-wail, red mouth open, hungry. He would catch one of Mary with her eyes closed, beer aloft. He would take one of—oh, look at that!—Pete and Lucius making out in the corner. He would take one of the sign behind the bar, hand-written in sharpie, reading Behave Yerself and caption it No <3.

He would find the light, and he would capture it and he would curate it and he would feed it to the world so they could think about how the world could be.

The band takes a break and Mary turns to him, smiling.

“So you never explained what leaving Blackbeard had to do with being afraid of me,” she says, and she is nothing if not direct, Stede is gathering. It’s a relief after living in the tomb of his parents’ silence and the devastating in-between with Ed where Ed would bare his soul to the world and shrink from Stede.

“Well you see…”

He starts talking without a plan and gets lost. He’s not done sorting through it himself, there’s no way to get into it all here, in public, during a fifteen minute intermission.

“It’s just … I’ve been … Since I got back. It was a, well, a rough transition to come back home with my parents and start school,” he says, accidentally stumbling on the truth. “I had been working all the time and now I’m not, and I don’t really have many friends—apart from Pete, who might hate me now anyway. Feels like I’ve spent the past year and a half trying to eat soup with a fork. I suppose you could say I’ve been … depressed.”

It’s a relief to say it out loud.

“Oh, Stede,” she says, freezing cold hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry to hear that. I’m glad you made it tonight. I’m glad we ran into each other again. I feel … safe. Around you.”

There is a moment then, one he recognizes. One where tension should crackle, one where their faces draw nearer as though pulled magnetically. He does, he reckons, feel some kind of anxiety. But it’s not the same anxiety he felt with Ed.

With Ed, he was afraid Ed wouldn’t kiss him.

With Mary, he’s afraid she will. And then he’ll have to be responsible for it. He'll lose another friend to his allergy to intimacy.

He should tell her. He should tell her that sometimes he f*cks men. A man. He f*cks Ed. f*cked. Past tense. He f*cked Ed.

He smiles, hoping to show that there is no tension here, no anticipation, nothing they might perhaps be on the precipice of.

She reads it wrong.

She gets closer. She smells like lily and musk, like walking past The Gap at the mall. Her lipgloss is sticky when she kisses him. It’s short and cute, what Stede might call a smooch.

“No pressure,” she says, grinning. “But I’m here when you’re ready.”

- JUNE -

“Exhibit A,” Lucius says, finger smearing a print across the screen, “blurry photo that is unmistakably your torso. Exhibit B, ambiguous flowery caption: sometimes love falls out of you. Exhibit C, three photos later, a photo of THE BACK OF A BLONDE HEAD OF CURLS, Exhibit D, caption: summer leaves and takes the warmth with it, Exhibit 5 or whatever, ambiguous text: I’ve learned to avoid falling in love with a person because it’s antithetical, I think, to all this. Incompatible. I don’t know how to be in love with a person and the world at the same time, it feels like being rent apart, like there’ll never be enough of me. CONCLUSION: Stede Bonnet, you are a liar.”

“Lucius please, I am not a liar,” he says, overloud, just as the library goes dead silent.

He winces. Ed’s apparently feeling nostalgic. According to the post he found an old roll of film that had been in some other old Goodwill camera Stede hadn’t even known he’d had, developed it, written about it.

The paragraph under Lucius's finger goes on, and Stede reads it like sticking shards of glass into his eyeballs.

The parties love me and the strangers love me and the city loves me and I love it all right back and it never makes me feel too little, too limited, too small for it. In the city, I am enough.

“So you were in a relationship with him.”

“Absolutely not!”

“Okay, so you were hooking up with him.”

“I did not say that!”

“Let me be clearer,” Lucius says slowly, like he’s talking to a stupid dog. “Have you or have you not seen his penis?”

“This conversation is not appropriate for—"

“Oh, that’s absolutely a yes.”

“It is not a yes,” he lies.

“I knew it, I KNEW there was something between you, you get all squirrely whenever he comes up, you call him Ed despite everyone on earth calling him Blackbeard, you don’t read his blog despite supposedly being supportive of it, you won’t give anyone the whole story about why you left. You were in love with him.”

“Lucius, please,” Stede pleads.

Ed’s done nothing wrong. Not really. He didn’t show Stede’s face, or name him. Referenced him only in vagaries. Which stings and comforts in exact measure.

The truest thing Ed’s ever said to him was that his former self would hate his current self. Then again, his current self hates his current self.

Lucius’s sharp eyes soften.

“Petal. Is this why you aren’t sleeping with Mary yet? Even though it’s been months?”

“For god’s—how do you possibly know that?”

“Oh, babe, it’s obvious. Like, exceedingly obvious, like, at first glance you might be cousins if you weren’t so differently complected obvious. Like, obvious is too weak a word, if obvious is the east, you and Mary not having sex is the sun. If obvious were a horse, it—"

“ALRIGHT, alright, I get it.” He puts his head in his hands, defeated.

He’s right. They’re dating, if you can call it that. Stede likes her, enjoys spending time with her. She’s wry and observant, makes him laugh. She flirts openly. And Stede is a fount of excuses, early mornings and assignments due and important reasons to need to run home. She allows it. She eyes him knowingly and she smiles and she lets him lie, and every time it happens he thinks it’s the last he’ll see of her. But she’s always got something on her calendar—an art gallery showing, a film, another of Eve’s shows—and he’s always the one she calls.

“Look, between us, it was … complicated. Everything I said about why I left was true. It was difficult living with him, especially toward the end. He’s in the past, and I wish him nothing but the best.”

“But you did love him.”

“It’s hard to explain. We saved each other.”

“Due respect, which is none, you don’t seem saved to me. You seem sad, and, well. Compulsorily heteronormative. Well, ironically, except with Mary. With Mary you just seem sad.”

He stares at the screen. More paragraphs about the warmth that left, the love that isn’t, the world that couldn’t be.

The last line of the post: Nothing bites harder than an unlived life inside you trying to fight its way out.

Lucius is right, he thinks.

It’s not that he doesn’t like Mary. He enjoys being around her, truly. He’s a bit afraid of her, but that’s nothing new. Only person he’s not afraid around is—well. See, he’s gotta stop doing that. Because that’s the thing: he’s told her all kinds of things about himself, his family, his failures, his regrets. It’s just that whenever there’s a lull, all he wants to talk about, really, is Ed.

But Ed’s too close. Too deep. Too real. It’s not a conversation he can have with a woman he barely knows over mediocre Thai food.

And Ed’s in the past, like he just said. It’s about time he started acting like it.

On his way to the car, he pulls the his cell phone out of his pocket, takes a big deep breath.

“Mary! Hello! Wondering if you’re free this evening.”

In the end, it was easy.

He’d taken her to a little spot overlooking the water. They’d sat tilted toward each other on the little green bench. He’d held himself steady as he’d explained—nothing she hadn’t heard already. Clunky re-entry, struggling to find my place, my purpose, nervous to start something. He’d thanked her for her kindness, her patience. He tried to be as honest as he could be, with the exception of refusing to acknowledge, even to himself, the churning fear in his guts telling him this was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Maybe it was wrong. But blithely doing what felt right had gotten him into that mess with Ed, alone, broke, miserable, desperate. Maybe it was time to stop running. Maybe it was time to grow up.

She’d listened eagerly, sharp enough to know something was up. So now it was time.

It was time.

“I like you, Mary,” he says, willing himself to sound like he means it, because he does. “And I’ve been unfair to you. But I’d like to fix it.”

He takes her hand in the space between them, embarrassed by how sweaty his palm is in her smooth, cool one. She looks happy—smiling, easy, relaxed. It’s fine, he can do this, he can be normal, he can be Mary’s for a while. Now all he has to do is summon the strength to kiss her and then—

“Is this about Ed?”

The air goes cold.

“Excuse me?”

“Stede. I’m asking if you’re over Ed.”

“But. But I mean, we didn’t—that is, there’s nothing to—"

“Were you two sleeping together?”

“Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean it was some—"

“If he walked up right now and asked you to be with him, would you do it?”

He is going to throw up and then he is going to faint and then his body will pitch right over the embankment into the water where he will drown and then this suffering will finally and at long last be—

“Of course not,” he says with a bitter laugh, feigning shocked disgust. “Did Lucius tell you this? It’s absurd, he’s got some sick obsession with it, I can’t get him to drop it. I’m sorry if he gave you the idea that—"

“It wasn’t Lucius, Stede,” is all she says.

If it wasn’t Lucius, he can’t lie his way out of it. He feels his whole system go into freefall.

He’ll never be as good at wearing stories as Ed is.

“Well, you’re sharp to have picked up on it,” he says, ignoring what her eyebrow does. “But that was a, a brief thing, a stupid drunken fling, it was—it was a mess. It’s in the past. Where it belongs.”

“And you’re not gay? You’re not gonna wake up in twenty years and divorce me once you realize this life isn’t for you?”

It’s also a real question and he knows it, despite the way she softens it with her deadpan.

Nothing bites harder than an unlived life inside you trying to make its way out.

He needs this conversation to end, he needs it to be over, the agony will rip him apart.

He opens his mouth to speak, but no, he can’t take another second of it.

He leans across and kisses her.

And she lets him.

Later, it’s all elbows and sorrys. They’re in his basem*nt room, which is bigger than hers and comes with the guarantee that his parents won’t care she’s there—in fact they’d probably be thrilled.

He feels like he’s never seen his own space before. All at once, it feels childishly tidy, too precise. The futon with the blanket he’s been using for ten years, since he was a little kid. The books stacked in size order on his desk, coasters. Like he’s both a child living by his parents made up rules and a junior adult, contorting himself to fit them all over again even though nobody cares anymore. He wants to mess it up, throw some clothes in a pile in the corner, get a mug half-full of coffee and leave it on the sh*tty berber basem*nt carpet.

But it’s too late. She’s there, and the light is low, and her skin is so soft it seems impossible.

He doesn’t want to think of Ed, but there he is, already. Ed had topography: rough hair on his legs, at his groin, swell of muscles in his thighs, bumps of scars on his body—and later, the faint lines of new ink under his skin.

She’s porcelain doll smooth, which is thrilling in its own right, but alien, almost wrong. She’s smaller somehow, too, out of her vintage mod mini dress, a bony slip of a thing. By comparison, Stede feels huge, gangly, wrong.

But she doesn’t mind. She’s touching him like she likes it, kissing him like she means it. She’s smoothing the shirt off his shoulders and taking her time with it, stopping to squeeze at his neck, the muscle of his tricep, exploring the topography of him.

He feels it, he does.

But he’s never had sex with a woman before, and he’s not sure how to please her. And if he can’t please her—if she isn’t satisfied with their encounter—it will be a sign. A sign to him that he’s done this all wrong, that he’s meant to be with men, a sign to her that she was right and she should leave him.

He can’t let that happen. She can’t have that thought.

A condom is produced (from her purse?) and he turns to put it on because it seems like the polite thing to do.

Her tiny cold hand smoothes across his freckled back.

“Stede,” she says softly. “Here.”

She turns him to face her and she’s nude now, fully divested from her bra and panties, and his terror is crystalline, multifaceted. Her tit* are huge, and his eyes go right to them, and he’s ashamed of himself, no better than an animal.

But then she looks openly at his semi-erect co*ck and says, “If you had told me about that, I would have insisted we start doing this much, much sooner.”

He laughs, and he’s grateful, and he thinks: you are my best friend. It blunts the sharper edges of his fear. She’s easy, natural at this. She strokes him slowly to full hardness with the other hand on his pectoral muscle and he doesn’t know if he’s allowed to touch her. He is shocked to find he wants to. Her hands are cold but her body is warm, he can feel it. She steps in closer and he feels one of her nipples graze his stomach and it’s a rush as potent as any carnival ride and he’s strapped in just as tight.

She puts the condom on and even that feels good, too good, too much on top of his nerves. She leads him to his own bed and he thinks: Ed’s never been here. This doesn’t belong to him.

On top of her, he feels huge, too heavy for her tiny body, but she’s unfazed, pulling him down by the neck, writhing as she kisses him. He pushes into her and the jolt of it almost ends it right there, she’s warm and soft and welcoming, he’s shocked at how much of her he can feel as she tries to grind herself against him, mouth open, fingers digging into his flesh. He moves his hips tentatively and feels humiliation mix with adrenaline and the almost dizzying need to keep rutting to completion, but he can’t, he’s too close, it will be over before it starts and then she will know.

He pulls out, leaving her gasping, and moves down her body. She laughs dementedly and puts two hands on his head, helping him along. He tastes only latex first, but then her, sweet as cotton candy, tang of citrus, wetter than he could have dreamed.

From there, it’s no trouble at all: she arches and whines, she says fingers, fingers, and he inserts two instinctively. She guides his head with a strong grip, undulating against his tongue, whispering yes and please and yes, and then she’s coming and he can feel her pleasure pulsating around his fingers, twitching against his mouth, going and going and going, and he thinks yes, thank you, yes.

Her leg kicks and she giggles with overstimulation and hauls him up by the shoulders and he feels invincible, unstoppable, all powerful.

He flips her tiny body by the hips and positions himself.

“f*ck,” she says, “f*ck sh*t yes.”

As he presses in, as his eyes fall shut and his head tips back, there he is again, lost in a dream of Ed as he’s never seen him, spread like this, debased, rocking back and forth with Stede’s hips, begging him with his body, whining, writhing, shaking. As soon as it’s there in his mind it’s immutable, solid as the foundation of the house, unshakable as his need. He comes folded over her back, mouth open, thinking of Ed.

As his body crashes down, he feels bad for thinking of Ed.

He doesn’t know yet that he’ll feel guilty when it happens again tomorrow, guilty again when it happens on Saturday night, less guilty when it happens in a month, and completely numb to it when it happens in a year. He doesn’t know yet that thinking of Ed will become compulsory: he will f*ck his girlfriend and think of Ed; he will f*ck his fiancee and think of Ed; he will f*ck his wife and think of Ed. He doesn’t know yet that he will think of Ed as he conceives his first child; he doesn’t know yet that he will think of Ed when he conceives his second child. He doesn’t know yet that for every moment for which he has no choice but to experience his dull, ordinary, corporeal form: Ed will be there with him.

He will graduate from college and the smile in his picture will be a memory of greasy pizza and a news crawler. He will start his career and use the computer at his desk to check Ed’s blog, so that Mary will never have to find it in their browser history at home. He will watch as Ed’s hair reaches his waist, as his body grows into itself, as he churns through parties and events and, eventually, appearances. He will witness new piercings, new tattoos. He will fixate on photos in which Ed’s eyes look directly outward, staring down the barrel of Stede’s broken, stupid, selfish heart. He will watch in awe as Ed’s writing becomes sharper, more precise, less instinctively self-deprecating and more authoritative, more direct, as his brand becomes razor sharp, as he posts with rote efficiency.

He will start each entry into his own private, paper journal with Dear Ed, and hope that Ed can sense it out there somewhere.

His feelings about these rituals will change. At times he will feel despair so deep it borders on clinical. Other times, he will feel rage so bright it eclipses the sun, furious at his inability to let this go. Yet other times, he will feel a joy so vibrant it threatens to jolt his heart right back into beating, he will feel awe that he ever got to know a love that impacted him so.

He’ll stop checking the website.

Still: Ed—secretly, silently—will be the first thing he thinks of every morning and the last thing he thinks of every night.

He will never tell a soul.

For twenty years.

TWENTY YEARS LATER

- SEPTEMBER -

God, the quiet.

Rare as a hen’s teeth, the opposite of a perfect storm—a perfect void. Mary’s in the shed, painting. Alma and Louis are at their cousins’ for a birthday sleepover. No book club laughter, no TV droning. Only Stede, his brain, the book he’s reading, the crisp fall night air breezing through the cracked window, and the brandy he’s about to pour.

These days, he finds solitude more restful than sleep.

But then, that’s probably always been true.

In his younger years, being alone was escape, it was freedom. Alone, there was no father around to hurl insults, no mother to smother him in her tears. The monsters lived in his house, at his school, not under his bed.

Now, it doesn’t feel quite so dire, but still: the act of being who his family needs him to be—a father, a husband—drains him. He doesn’t feel like either of those things (those things are what his father was), and he’d long ago stopped expecting to, and so the act of performing them eclipses any interiority he might otherwise experience. No preferences, no opinions. Only a man at the center of the wheel, looking down the spokes to make sure everyone else is still attached, like a penitentiary guard.

But not when he’s alone.

Something happens on the rare nights he’s alone, lately. An unfurling within, a kid cracking a door and peering out to see if the coast is clear before committing mischief.

He commits no mischief these days, but it can still feel like it. Pretending he knows how to conduct the Saint-Saëns on the turntable, reciting sonnets he memorized in college. Watching bits of old movies and letting them light him up, fully feeling the impact all the way down inside—not an ounce of stoicism in sight. Eating half a box of Lucky Charms and calling it dinner.

Even when he does none of those things—even when he sits quietly in his office reading—he still feels like he’s skipping school. He hums along with the record player. He scribbles in his diary a bit, Dear Ed, a rite that had evolved from compulsion to superstition to dull habit through the years.

Thoughts of Ed don’t bite the way they used to, not since he made a pact with himself to stop checking his blog. It had become an obsession, especially in the early years of his marriage. It’s weird to think back and consider that even now, he can’t explain why he was doing it. There was no good reason, only blind compulsion to relive the pain. Like his son, sticking his finger in his belly button and saying, eww, gross, as he smells it, over and over again.

It had, at one point, truly gotten out of control. Ed would post a photo of him and someone he met with a name or a hyperlink in the caption to the person’s blog or band or something and Stede would come to three hours later, still searching, still zooming in on photos, still obsessing, and almost nothing but the fear of getting caught could drag him away.

And he’d almost been caught.

Mary, at his office, surprising him for lunch, just as he’d unearthed the page for the band of some asshole in a cheap suit trying to look expensive who called himself Ned Low.

What are you looking at?Guileless, kind.

Oh, this band I heard about recently, I’m really into them, he’d said, pressing play on the video only to discover it was some sort of tortured blend of classical and disco that grated his ears.

Mary shot him a look, but didn’t press.

Later, he sobbed in the bathroom, staring at his dead eyes in the mirror and begging his heart, his head, his soul to let him go. He’d vowed that minute: never again. And he hadn’t. Not when Pete talks about what Blackbeard posted last week, not when a parent at school casually mentions she reads it, not when he’s alone and drunk, not ever.

It’s not because he hates Ed, of course. No. It’s just that Ed occupies some space in his brain, his heart, that nobody else can ever get to, nobody can know. It’s too close to him to be casually revealed. They wouldn’t understand. They couldn’t. He’s not sure he understands it himself, anyway. How could he, when he’s oriented his entire life around disengaging from it?

No matter. Not tonight. No point in getting stuck in the past now, when he’s finally alone with his thoughts, his time. His book!

A new thing, his book. He’d gone into his local indie bookshop last week and they’d had it there behind the counter, held under his name, paid in full.

I didn’t order this, he’d protested.

Well, it’s on your account, the bookseller had said, tilting the computer so Stede could see. And it’s paid for. If you don’t want it anymore, I can do a refund for store credit, you can grab something else?

No point in all that, he’d thought. Must have been a mix-up on their end, and he wasn’t about to get someone in trouble for it. He’d taken the book, with apologies, and bought the other one he’d initially gone in for.

He’d simply shelved it, at first. But tonight, he thought: why not? What’s an unexpected bonus alone night for, if not discovering something new, something surprising?

He plucks it from the shelf. The title is Turtle Vs. Crab, which seems right off the bat like it’s pretty far out of his zone of interest, but he flips it over.

The back copy reads:

A heart-stopping, all-consuming novel about a teenage boy’s fight for his soul.

Turtle is on his own. He's a shifty, nimble kid from the bad side of town, raising himself when nobody can be bothered to, dodging his dad's fists and ignoring his mom’s pills. He grows up fast, hard, and loose. Until he meets Crab.

Colter Rain Alan Beret has everything Turtle doesn’t: money, manners, a big bright clean house. But what he needs is a friend. Their connection is unlikely as it is instant, undeniable, and electric. Propelled by their first real experience of friendship (and their first teenage crushes), together they’ll try to reinvent their lives, become something bigger than the both of them.

But as Turtle grows, Crab shrinks, unable to handle the challenge of life without guardrails. And Turtle struggles with the pressure to become his own hero—and everyone else’s.

With writing that sings and an aching tender heart at its center, Turtle Vs. Crab is a remarkable and moving effort from a writer at the height of his talent.

Sometimes the only way to survive is to thrive.

The copy starts something itching inside his brain, some ancient pang of guilt, some wily anxious thing. He’s going to hate the book, that’s for sure. He sips his brandy. He surveys his to-be-read pile.

No. He’ll read it, it’s fine. He’s being unfair.

An hour later and he’s a hundred pages in, reading almost faster than his brain can absorb the information. The sentences have rhythm, movement. Reading it feels like dancing with the prose, swaying back and forth, being held in motion. Even scenes where nothing happens, there is the sense of momentum, never a word wasted.

And Turtle. He’s a marvel. Nimble doesn’t begin to cover it, he thinks. The kid is self-aware to a fault, savvy, cunning, kind only when the recipient earns it. He’s a mess who knows he’s a mess but can’t find a way out of it. His dad’s a bastard, a mean drunk lout, a brutal and unthinking small-minded bigot. Turtle refuses to internalize it, though. It spurs him to be different rather than bitter. He works to be kind, curious, open-hearted.

Crab shows up, and he’s a bit of a sh*theel, oblivious, it seems, to how he comes off. Up himself, as Ed might have said once upon a time.

Ed.

That’s the thing of it, it keeps reminding him of Ed.

And sure, a thousand stories have been written about the grumpy smart one and the sunny stupid one, Stede’s read half of them himself.

But this feels … specific. He always felt like Ed could see straight through him, always felt like Ed kept him from hiding from himself. This feels like Ed boiled him down to a consommé, spilled that all over the pages.

But no. This isn’t Ed’s book.

He checks the cover for the author’s name: Jeffrey Thatch. He’s never heard of him. Sounds like a guy who should be writing legal thrillers about an accountant.

He shrugs. He turns the page.

About thirty pages later, Turtle and Crab get a job at a local ice cream place called Chippy’s, and Stede sits up a bit straighter.

This is it, he thinks. The moment where their friendship tips into more, the narrative has set them up beautifully, the ducks are all in neat little rows. And he’s right: they get into a play fight with some sauces, end up together in the break room, and Crab wipes some off Turtle’s face. You wear caramel well, he says, and it’s sweet enough, but Stede’s halfway out of his chair, wracked with madness, shouting, “he obviously wants this, you twit, do something!”

It’s Turtle who hauls him in, kisses him, Turtle who rearranges his world and knows it, and that’s what makes them magic, Stede thinks. Turtle needs someone who’ll be tenderly tentative, gentle, and Crab needs someone to lead him where he’s afraid to go. It’s perfect, he thinks. They’re perfect.

From there, the story plays out exactly how Stede’s expecting: the grand adventure of them running away, earth turning beneath their churning legs. Finding themselves and each other, a team. Building a life, a universe they carve out of time and space, finding the people who orbit them. A proxy for Frenchie, a neighbor Turtle sees playing the guitar naked in his living room. A proxy for Archie, a loud, horny idiot. A proxy for Jim, wiry and excitable. A proxy for Olu, and god, Stede misses him.

A proxy for Izzy.

Like a coward.

The book leaves Crab there, wraps up with heartbroken Turtle’s life just starting to soar. Unfortunately, his fame lets his father find him. His father shows up to the apartment feeling like Turtle owes him. There’s a fight, a bloody one, and Turtle kills him with a whiskey bottle, jamming the broken end into his guts, puncturing something vital. He flees, and it’s implied he goes to find Crab, though the text doesn’t state it explicitly, and at the end, Stede’s a shaking mess, ears ringing in the silence long after the record ended, barely breathing.

He is aware that a barrier between himself and his heart has been dismantled. The memories rush like blood to a wound: driving to a town just to see what was there, Ed’s hand on the back of his headrest, forearm resting on his shoulder. Music up, windows down, screaming falsetto along to Livin’ Thing after finding a box of old ELO tapes on the sidewalk, it’s a terrible thing to lose.

The time they broke the rules of the building and climbed the back stairs to the roof, sat there passing a bottle back and forth, crying about how many f*cking lights there were in the city.

The time it rained a week later and flooded the basem*nt because they hadn’t closed the hatch all the way, and Izzy had a goddamn conniption but never figured out who broke the rules.

The Fourth of July when the entire building wound up on the stoop, radio on the sidewalk, bottle of cheap wine in every direction, all you had to do was stick your arm out. They talked about how stupid fireworks are, ooohing and ahhhing in unison as a bit, watching the world explode and not giving a single sh*t because they were all together, drunk, young, dancing in the street.

The early days, when Ed would crawl into his bed, hair wet from the shower, face wet from tears, and fold himself around Stede’s body like a robe, and Stede wouldn’t know what was wrong but knew to hold him.

The way it felt to kiss him. The way they’d spend hours doing it when they were still exploring, when they were still in awe.

He’d chalked it up to novelty over the years, when he had to convince himself his marriage wasn’t as boring as he suspected it was. It would never feel like that again, it’s because he was 20, he’d be a fool to expect it now. What he had was realer, deeper. He only had to give it time.

Only, he’d given it twenty years.

Last month, at a party at Eve’s, Stede had overheard Pete tell Lucius, If I could marry you again today, babe, I’d f*ckin’ do it, and Stede had thought instantly: I wouldn’t, and even he wasn’t too far numb and gone to know that was a bad sign.

All those years, he thought Ed didn't want to see him, but Ed had seen everything. Right down to the meat of him.

Stede used to be furious Ed never wrote about him. But now he understands. Stede's too close to Ed, it would be too revealing. Blackbeard was always half performance art, half smoke and mirrors. It was always a bit of bluster about how fun and cool and clever he was. Ed never wanted the world to see him, he wanted the word to love him, and those things can be different.

Writing about Stede? It would have cut too deep, too close to the quick. Ed would never put his heart out there like that.

That’s why he had to do it anonymously. That’s why he had to fictionalize it.

Stede wasn’t a story Ed could wear. He was too deep inside. He was a story Ed could only carry.

The same reason he could never fully tell Mary—or anyone else—about Ed.

Ed. The author.

He knows it now, because he allows himself to.

Ed wrote this book.

The book contains no author bio, no headshot. He flips to the back to the acknowledgements. They’re microscopically short.

Thanks to Basilica, for putting up with me. Thanks to my agent for repping an annoying reclusive egomaniac. Thanks to the readers, who still show up even though I won’t let you take selfies.

And the last line knocks the breath clean out of his body.

And thanks to Horse Hat. You know who you are. I know you’ll never see this. Better or worse, there’s no book without you.

He slams the cover shut.

At the desk, he searches.

Thatch has an author page on the publisher website. The bio reads: Jeffrey Thatch is an author. He lives in a city and he never went to college and he loves you very much.

Ed. No mistaking it.

He keeps searching, looking for anything—a social media page, a photo of him signing a book, anything.

Nothing.

The only information gleaned is that Turtle Vs. Crab was his first book, he’s had two more since. The most recent one only released this year, and he’d done a string of appearances for it, several of which were clustered around the city a few hours away that Stede tries never to go to or think about if he can help it. There are a few more on the tour list, spots across the country Stede has no sane way of accidentally wandering in to.

“Alright, Thomas f*cking Pynchon,” Stede mutters, hesitating only a moment before pulling up Blackbeard’s Revenge. He scans back through for any hint Ed’s writing a book, any entry titled Turtle Vs. Crab, any photos of bookstores that might have been taken around the tour dates.

Nothing.

He searches a few different keywords, hits dead ends.

He scans the past few posts. Looks like Ed still lives in the city. Posts are more sporadic than they used to be, and somehow even less personal, more a series of verbose digressions than the sort of lived-in journal entries they used to be.

And then: a photo of Ed. Out west somewhere, burnt orange world, sprawled in the back of a pickup truck, tall boy of PBR next to him, smiling big and warm and brilliant. Stede’s face drifts closer to the screen. Ed’s hair is long and silver and wavy and his beard is scruffy and gray and his eyes are Ed’s eyes, Ed’s beautiful dark, twinkling eyes, and Stede bursts into tears.

He needs to find him. He needs to talk to him, at least, tell him he read the book, tell him what it meant to him. All twenty years of wanting to talk to Ed rush him at once, he wonders if you can die from wanting something.

He tries location searches on Twitter—nothing. Facebook—nothing, because Ed wouldn’t be caught dead there and he knows it.

And then: r/BlackbeardsRevenge.

A thread titled Is Blackbeard writing books under the pseud Jeff Thatch?

Eighty-nine comments.

A snapshot from outside a bookstore, taken through the windows: a man in a hat and sunglasses at a podium, a NO PHOTOS sign next to him on the signing table.

A list of sentences found in the books that echo sentences found on the blog.

A comment comparing Ed’s posting schedule to his touring schedule.

“f*ck,” Stede says.

He must find him, he must speak to him, he must finish this unfinished business before it’s too late, before it kills him. Ed wrote a book about him and in it Ed's past comes back to haunt him and Stede stabbed him in the guts and—oh, god, what is he doing, just sitting here? He could be making plans, he could be moving, right now, he could be—

“Stede? Did I hear you crying?”

Mary’s voice sends him leaping to his feet. She stands behind him, dental pick in her hand.

“What are you still doing up, it’s after two—oh. Oh my god.”

Stede follows her sightline. He’s got twenty tabs open, all with Ed’s name visible in the bar. The tab he’s on is the photo of Ed in the pickup, smiling down the barrel of the camera.

He draws a breath, and for the first time, feels the air move through his entire body, lifting him.

You are my best friend, he thinks,and I am about to break your heart.

“We should talk,” he says.

Chapter 4: ~ the bridge ~

Chapter Text

Blackbeard’s Revenge, September 2002

Everyone talks about my life, my life, my life, but then I have these moments where suddenly I wake up awake and my life is MY LIFE. The trees explode in spring and they’re greener than anything has ever been and I feel something once petrified inside me clawing its way toward the light. I wake up in a filthy apartment that isn’t mine and someone’s at the other end of the inflatable mattress and a foot sticks out from under the blanket on the couch and I can do anything I want today so long as it doesn’t cost any money and I think jesus f*cking christ I’m free.

The first time it happened, I was on the highway, soaring down the interstate, heading west-ish, sun setting, windows down, music up, spitting my own hair out of my mouth when it wasn’t tangled in the seatbelt. The sign said NEXT EXIT: 29 MILES and all of a sudden my lungs weren’t big enough to hold all the air rushing in through the open windows, because I could be anyone, I could be anywhere, nobody would know. Nobody can touch me. No one will ever feel this because only I am feeling it. It’s mine, the whole f*ckin world is mine, it will keep turning so long as the wheels keep spinning. I felt drunk and I felt awake and I felt like I’d been alive thirty seconds and I felt stupid but like a baby where there’s just so much to f*ckin learn you gotta grow extra cells and then eat them to survive.

I turned to him—he was driving—and I said do you feel it, do you feel this, and he nodded and he smiled but I could tell he didn’t, I could tell it was mine. I could tell he was holding on too tight to feel it all, and sometimes the only way is to throw your hands up above your head and let gravity take you, let it go. There are some feelings we’re not meant to hold on to.

I leaned back and stuck my foot out the window and he said you’re gonna get yourself killed, but I knew I wouldn’t, I understood the world was giving me this, I understood it wouldn’t be the world that hurt me, it would be him because he was too afraid to feel it all.

I’m a race car, going faster and faster—where will I be? I’m a palindrome, same coming as going, a leather silhouette against the black sky, absence of stars the only evidence of my presence.

Nobody knew it but him.

But he’s gone and I’m just going.

December 2004

Dear Ed,

Is it weird that I want you to be proud of me? Weird that I want the validation of you looking at my life and thinking, okay, Bonnet, fair play to you. You’re happier, you’re healthier, you’re at peace. I want you jealous, Ed, and I know that isn’t right. I know it doesn’t make me a good person, but for once, for f*cking once, I want to be the object of someone’s envy, for once I want to know I got it right. How does a person know these things? Do normal people have some internal mechanism that dings like a toaster oven and tells you: you’ve done it correctly, your life is what it’s supposed to be. They must, right? It would be impossible for the world to keep on turning if everyone was like me.

Secretly, I dream of running into you, Ed. You come back here, some long weekend, some family function, I don’t know why anyone would ever come here. Point is, I run into you, I tell you I’m graduating college, and that I did it in three years, and that I’ve got a cool girlfriend who’s an artist and we have a little flat together and a social circle and plan for the future and I want you to think: okay, maybe I had it wrong, maybe I don’t know everything. Maybe I’m the one who f*cked up.

But you won’t think that because nobody ever would. People only need one quick look at me and to realize I'm a mess, a half-rendered NPC, a sentence using all the wrong punctuation.

Mary seems fine. She seems totally unfazed by it, and maybe that’s why I’m still doing this with her. It’s so strange, because sometimes I can’t fathom how she can’t see, how she doesn’t hear the screaming coming from inside of me, how she can’t notice the way I freeze every night when we climb into bed together.

The other day she said, I love how you always eat me out, but why are you so worried about making me come? Sometimes I won’t, and I always feel like that’s a bigger problem for you than it is for me.

I shrugged it off, but inside I was crumbling, lost under the debris of 25 years of pretending I’m not looking for signs, symbols, signals, faces in the goddamn toast. If she doesn’t come every time, it means something, if I turn her down when she wants sex, it means something, if we go more than two weeks without having sex, it means something. And, of course, if I tick all the boxes it means everything is fine, it means I’m doing it right, it means nobody knows.

I can hear you thinking, I thought you weren’t gay. You’re right to think it. I don’t have an answer for you. It’s funny, all our friends are queer. I find other straight couples tedious, oblivious even. We hang out at queer spots and enjoy queer culture, and every time I feel like I’m taking up space that doesn’t belong to me. Every time it feels like stolen valor. But then, so does calling myself someone’s future husband.

I told her I would try to ease up, be more present, enjoy myself more. But I don’t know if I can, Ed. I don’t know how to be. It must be written all over my face that every day, I’m afraid today is the day she will see.

I have to laugh at where this entry went. Can you believe I thought I’d earned your jealousy?

Blackbeard’s Revenge, March 2006

I want to tell you about a date.

We went for dinner, he ordered his iced tea unsweetened, his grilled chicken salad with dressing on the side. He said sugar’s bad for your teeth, makes you fat. Complained about it too, said it tasted like sh*t, but he works too hard to waste calories. He had the most insane body, of course, every ab it’s possible to have, all on top of each other like a kids toy for stacking. Big round hard tit* like a dream, could probably bench press me. At first I thought, hell yeah, f*ckin’ jackpot.

All that looks nice in a photograph, but sometimes that’s all it is, a pretty picture, a two-dimensional representation of a life, a phantasm, a f*ckery where a person should be. He doesn’t do anything with all that body. Doesn’t help people, doesn’t build sh*t, works at a f*ckin hedge fund on the computer.

I could tell he thought a body like his automatically makes someone great at sex. Dating him felt like he was admiring his own reflection in my eyes. Listening to him felt like talking to a bodybuilding dot com forum post about macronutrients. f*cking him felt like he brought himself to class for show and tell.

And I thought: you coward. You absolute f*ckin coward. In this world, you’d deny yourself sweetness? You’d call joy a waste in my company? Know what, I’ll take the sugar. I’ll take seven f*ckin sugars. I say pack it in and let it rot a hole straight down through me, give me a cavity so I can feel the whir of the drill and know I’m alive, give me a soft stomach my lovers can rest their heads on, let my body show the scars of a life lived. Seven sugars because the program at my funeral won’t say, Here lies Edward Teach. He refused cake on his birthday. He never felt a goddamn thing. He thought suffering was virtue. Rest in restraint, rest in the same empty nothing in which you lived, let life go on in your absence as it did before your presence. Rest in Peace Edward Teach: your life was frictionless, wholesome, unsweetened.

Nah. I want to lick the sugar out of your mouth, I want sticky fingers. I want to hear the rustle of the chip bag in the darkness when I come back from taking a piss because you figured I’d be hungry after, too.

He left at dawn to get in a run before work.

You can’t be hungry for me if you’re starving for everything you deny yourself.

June 2008

Dear Ed,

I’m up to feed Alma and the world is so quiet and it’s only an hour or so until I’d get up anyway. I haven’t written to you much. I feel guilty for it, isn’t that funny? I feel guilty that I had to stop reading, guilty that I don’t know your life either. Is it weird that I still feel like I owe you these bits of me, that someday I think I’ll be held to account for all these missing years? I picture it, sometimes, you and I, old friends, bygones bygone, a new kind of quiet, easy intimacy absent fear or expectation. Alma’s grown and gone and I have time again and I sleep through the night again and I know you again—and not just the fake you, the internet you, not Blackbeard, but YOU, all of you, your fidgeting leg and your bitten cuticles, your twisty eyebrow when I’ve said something stupid, the perfectly specific way you say ‘f*ck.’ We sit in a plush room and you have silver through your hair and beautiful lines around your eyes, and I say, would you believe I wrote to you? Almost every day? Journal entries, technically, but it’s wrong to call them that, I wouldn’t bother chronicling my life for anyone but you.

You’d laugh, and you’d clink your little whiskey glass against mine—there are rings on your fingers, you hold your graceful pinky out. Love letters? you’d joke, ribbing me as always. In a way, I’d say, and you’d know what I meant. Not a romantic love, not a childish love, something … older, deeper. Chronicled my life for everyone, you’d say. And I’d tell you that I get it now, or at least I think I do.

When you have no one, no family, there’s an impulse to create a record, I think. To make sure that someone knows you, even superficially, otherwise you’re only a tree falling in an empty forest. If your parents didn’t love you the way they were supposed to, I think it’s natural to try to extract some of what they were supposed to give you from the world—a sense of validation, love and support. A belief in your own story, your own objectivity. How are you supposed to have those things if nobody shows you? How are you supposed to see yourself without a mirror that loves you?

There’s an impulse to be the best at something, too, to prove yourself better than all your flaws and imperfections. To meet the unmet parts of yourself with compassion and excitement. To prove your life is worth it, perhaps. To justify yourself.

It’s funny, every decision in my life was difficult to the point of agony, as you well know. Every decision EXCEPT becoming a father. It sounds backwards, Ed, but I think we are going for the same thing, in a way, to be seen in ways we struggle to see ourselves, or feel we don’t deserve. To create a sort of environment nobody created for us. But also, to love and be loved without fear or pride or jealousy or resentment.

It occurs to me that last one sounds like a wedding vow. I wish I could claim that Mary and I love each other that way, but I’m not sure if it’s achievable with romantic love. The closest I ever came to feeling it, I think, was with you, in the early days. The wide-eyed awe, the admiration bordering on worship. The sense that so long as I was around you I was more than myself, different, better, bigger. I think I saw you as a god, Ed. A common mistake, if your comment section is to be believed. But I think I imbued you with much more power than you could ever wield.

You’re only a man, of course, I know that now. But there’s something about you, Ed. What you’ve done with the hand you’ve been dealt? It’s nothing short of extraordinary. I hope you know that, I hope you feel it. And absent that, I hope someone tells you every day.

Well, now I’m crying like a fool. It’s all I do since Alma, cry. I think I’ll go tell her how perfect she is some more.

Blackbeard’s Revenge, September 2010

You go on the date. You go on the date and you go on the date and you go on the date. Yeah, I’m a blogger. Yeah, it’s my job. You tell them the link and you watch their face and you can tell they already know. They show you a picture of a dog or a cat or a rabbit or a snake. You show them a picture of a party, an outdoor party, a beach party. They say wow and you say wow. You order another round or you order an appetizer or you go to another bar. They say three things that piss you off but one thing that changes you forever, and you write it in your pocket moleskin while they use the bathroom next to their name and the date. You dance. You dance even though it’s not a dancing place, you came to talk, but you’re bored of talking because jobs are boring and the rest is just a list of things you consume. You want to laugh, tell jokes, get silly. You want a different kind of dance. You don’t want to feel like Blackbeard, but you do, because that’s who they see now, because you told them. You’re only your armor, now. You don’t even have to be here. Could put a curse on the suit, curse it with your sentience, and send it in your stead. It feels like that, sometimes, like you’re just the outfit, just the presence. But what else do you do? You go on the date. You go on the date and you listen to them talk about the shows you don’t watch and you pretend to be more or less than you are. You slowly, casually, naturally steer the evening back to your neighborhood bar because this is the test. They know you here, you are not Him here, you are You. Inside are friends. One is your assistant now, fine, but still: your friend. A person trades shirts with you and you know that comes off weird, but you’re having a good time now, finally. You get up on the bar and you dance. Your friends dance with you. The bartender puts on your favorite song and pours you a shot and spills some onto the bar. When he slams his shot glass down it sprays in your eye and that earns you another free shot. You give it to your assistant and they mutter viejo with a smirk and down it. Your date asks if you always go this hard and you say no, but the real answer is only when I get bored, but you can’t say that. She says, is this a gay bar?, and you say yeah, I’m bi, and she leaves. He says, is this a gay bar?, and you say, yeah, but I’m bi, and then an hour later he’s gone and your glass is empty and the bartender is missing and you know they’re in the bathroom together and it’s fine, you don’t care, shot through the heart, another day for you and me in paradise. You didn’t want him to suck your dick anyhow, but it would be nice if he’d wanted to. Nice if he’d seen behind the cursed f*ckin suit, but you didn’t put it on to be seen, so whose fault is it anyway, dickf*ck? It doesn’t matter because the bar is perfect tonight, only people you like and none of the ones you hate, and the windows to the street are open, and the street is foggy, and the bartender is getting his dick sucked by your date so there’s nobody to stop you filling a pitcher and bringing it to the table, and you’re drunk, you’re so drunk, and the music is so loud and the walls are red and pulse with your heart and the clack of pool balls sounds like broken teeth and you’re wearing someone else’s shirt and you’ll do it all again next friday because it’s sort of your job and sort of your hobby and sort of an experiment to see if you can do it forever without ever stopping, and you stare out of the window into the fog hovering in the street and you imagine seeing a shape there, it moves toward you, blurry, but you recognize it and it’s like home coming to you and you smile, god, you smile and you’re crying and it’s still coming and you might live through this night, you might—

December 2012

Dear Ed,

Last week, my parents came over for dinner. They told Alma off for spreading her legs while she was sitting, said it was unladylike. The commented on her short hair, on her rough nails, on the way she peppers sentences with the word ‘like.’ They told her not to talk so loudly, and I told them it’s my house, she can talk as loud as she feels like talking.

When I dispatched her to the yard to practice (she wants to be on the basketball team next quarter), they lectured me about the potential for broken fingers and damaged knees. They turned to Louis, who isn’t even three, and bemoaned his nail polish, his posture, his haircut, his voice, all of it, addressing Mary and I like he wasn’t sitting right there, like he couldn’t hear them.

I thought about how you begged me to let them go, but I wouldn’t, I just placed their phantoms right there in the corner and let them sit in judgment of everything I said, everything I did, every choice I made. I let them laugh at me for loving you, for loving our friends. I let them shame me for thinking I could be something different, that I could know myself enough to move through this world. I let them bully me, my whole life, and I was standing there letting them do it to my perfect children.

I asked them to please stop commenting on the children. They said the children ought to get used to it. I snapped, told them I never did, that my feelings were very hurt, actually, that I spent the last twenty years afraid to make any misstep, to fail in any way to conform to their pointless standards, that I spent years of my life with mangled, rubbery bones from forcing myself to live inside the cage they built for me.

Mary stood stone still and wide eyed as I shrieked at them. I told them I was afraid to be human. And it’s true, Ed, I’m afraid to be human, all those standards I invented, the way I used to panic if they weren’t met, I never saw myself as fallible—not because I thought I knew better than anyone, but because I wasn’t allowed to be. I wasn’t allowed to make mistakes. I wasn’t allowed to be a child, any time I acted like one I was punished. I was a perfect f*cked up neurotic adult for my entire childhood, and now I'm a f*cked up neurotic adult and the only person who's bothered by it is me.

They said I was being ridiculous, to stop this right now, they're only trying to help, and for a second, Ed, and I'm ashamed of it, I capitulated. I sat down at the table and started cutting the bread, and then I thought: wait.

I used to be afraid of the tailored straight jacket. I’ve gone from the straight jacket to the empty shirt to the emperor’s new f*cking clothes. What’s the point of trying to do it better if I crumble the second they’re in the room?

I asked them to leave, Ed.

I’ve never been so terrified in all my life. I shook like a dog.

But they left.

I want to say I’m sorry I didn’t do it back then, but I’m trying to allow myself to be human.

Blackbeard’s Revenge, March 2014

They say if you’re stuck, describe the weather.

That’s all I’ve been doing here, almost fifteen years now. Describing the weather.

It’s a beautiful day, the sky is blue, the are no clouds, and you go to work. You work at a fast food joint, and every time you mention that to someone for the first time for the rest of your life, that person will laugh, and you’ll have to explain that you were serious. The sky is blue and you are smoking a cigarette outside the loading door at the back even though you are not supposed to, but this place is a living breathing nexus of rules. You can break any rule you like, so long as the system keeps humming along. You’re maybe sixteen, and you already figured that out. The sky is bright, crystalline blue and a boy with his hands dug into his pockets comes trudging along the highway, there’s not even a sidewalk, and you know he’s coming here because where else would he be going? There’s nothing else, there’s only cheeseburgers and smoking teenagers. He disappears behind a hedgerow and you finish your butt, stub it out on your shoe, flick it into the dumpster and head inside. He’s there, uniform in hand, being talked down to by the manager, and you think: that one’s mine. On his body, the uniform is bluer, blue like the sky, you want to take the hat right off his head so you can see the curls again, but that’s a rule you can’t break, so you stare at the bits above his ears where the ends stick out, and you ask him what the f*ck he’s doing here. He tells you and you don’t believe him, but you’ll learn.

There are big puffy clouds in the sky, long ones, they look like frankfurters, and yes that’s a horny thought but that’s who you are these days. You wander your neighborhood looking for something. You don’t know what it is, but you pace endless laps in search of it, sailing forever on an endless sea, around and around. You’re not supposed to want the thing you want, you’re pretty sure of that. The last person who wanted it with you dismissed it even as it was happening, kids experimenting, called it better than nothing, treated it like a joke, and you let him because he was older and meaner and cooler and it felt good at the time. This doesn’t feel like an experiment though, this feels like the solution, this feels like long division with no remainders. It feels like the thing you’re walking towards even though it lives on the other side of town, the place you don’t go because that’s breaking a rule that would disrupt their system. It’s cool today, wintery, and your coat isn’t a coat even though you call it one so that nobody will notice. The clouds look like frankfurters and you are wondering what it would be like to press against him and feel it, to understand he felt it too.

It’s pouring rain, and you’re at work, and the stupid headset is so irritating today, barely fits over your hair. You’re in the booth (taking orders and money) and he’s running (filling bags with food), which means you’re wet and cold and he’s hot and dry, but it also means that he’s got the headset on, too, listening. It’s dinner time and you’re busy, down a person, so it’s just you two for the whole drive through, which means you don’t care about the wait times, don’t care about anything except that there’s a line between the two of you, his voice in your ear between taking orders, making you laugh. The thunder booms and the car at the window is the worst of the night—there’s always one unequivocally Worst Customer, and you always know who it will be the instant the interaction begins. She’s got a car full of people, mad of them, like clowns. The people are all individually saying their orders but they’re too far away from the speaker to hear, so you have to ask her to repeat them, and when she does she always gets them wrong, each meal has to be gone over three times minimum before it’s in the system. Worse, each new person takes forever to decide, as though it’s a brand new menu and not the same ten f*cking things it’s always been, and you are losing your f*cking mind, and then he says ketchup in your ear, and you start to giggle. There is a button on the register labeled ketchup, because technically you’re supposed to charge for extra sauces, ten cents per extra sauce, but nobody uses it. The two of you use it in drive-thru, you call it the spite button, you press it every time someone annoys you. Nobody ever sees it because nobody wants their receipt, and so every time someone is rude, it costs them ten cents. Lightning illuminates the highway beyond the drive-thru lane and you say ma’am? Will that be all?, and she shouts back would you give me a goddamn minute, and he says ketchup, and you press the spite button. She fumbles the next meal two more times and he says ketchup, and you press it again. As you read it back to her she yells that you missed a box of chicken nuggets, even though you know you didn’t, and he says ketchup. In the end you charge her almost a whole dollar in spite, and when she pulls up to pay you’re laughing so hard you have to duck beneath the window to compose yourself but you can’t, so he has to take her money leaning over you crumpled on the ground laughing, and she says you don’t sound like the boy who took my order, and he says, well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, and it’s bitchy on a level you didn’t think he was capable of and somehow that’s so much funnier, your head is pressed to your hands which are flat on the ground like worship and you are crying over ninety cents and the rain pours and pours and pours, it pounds against the window as the drumbeat beneath your laughter.

The sky is so blue it feels fake, like how California looks in the movies, and you’re still looking for him, but you don’t realize that he’s hiding from himself. You left him there in the bed, walked straight out the door and the sky was so blue, blazing, screaming blue, you’ll never forget it. You have a mad urge to go back and get him, make him come see this beautiful day, but you can’t because he just stuck a f*ckin rapier right through your liver and what’s worse is he doesn’t even know he did it because he’s only a cloud of fear in the shape of a person and you sit on the sidewalk halfway to the coffee place and you cry big bright screaming blue tears, a mirror of the sky in your heart, and you think everything will be too good to be true for the rest of your life and you’re right.

The weather is unseasonable, but so is all weather these days, everyone just pretends they don’t notice. The spring feels like July and the winter doesn’t start until January. You go to a show and you have VIP passes which basically just means you get to use a nicer bathroom. Her voice is a church bell calling you home, the songs the same ones you played in the car, flying down the highway. The lights are colors you’ve never seen and the floor undulates with feeling. You are a little crossfaded and tingly, a little tender with overwhelm, a little stupid. Your eyes close because you must, because the other senses demand your full focus. You inhale the music, and it burns your throat on the way down and it moves through your body from your lungs and you move, you move to it, and in some ways you’re still just putting miles on your old worn converse trying to find it, whatever it is, still looking for it. You’ve looked for it at bars and parties and in other countries and in bathrooms and parks and in bags of little white powder and in nice beds and in sh*tty beds and in very nice beds and this is the closest you ever get, when it’s just you and the f*cking music, when you sway with the ghost of him. It’s not the same, it’s not, it just is not the same, but you still have hope because you’re a f*cking idiot and in spite of everything you wish he was here.

You still walk. Only thing that’s different is the weather.

June 2016

Dear Ed,

Last week, I was digging in the garden and found an odd rock. Something was strange about it, it felt almost hollow inside. I hit it against another rock until it cracked open, and it wasn’t a rock, it was a petrified orange. A relic from some long gone tree, or an abandoned snack, who knows, but I held the pieces in my hands and burst into tears.

I cried, and I thought about petrification, about how it means to change something organic into a stony concretion, but also that it means to be afraid, to be literally paralyzed with fear. All these years, I thought I had made myself tougher, stonier, by unlearning how to feel. Turns out I was only petrifying.

I held that orange in my hands and cried and wondered: what might it have been like to be unafraid? Where might we be? How deep might my love go?

There’s flesh in me, still, sweet and moist and alive, I can feel it. If I don’t break myself open—if I don’t free my heart—how long until I’m completely calcified? How long until I’m dead?

All that time I tortured myself: was it romantic or platonic? Was it a fling or forever? What was I worried about? What was I holding back for? Does it matter if a car crash is romantic or platonic? When a dish smashes on the kitchen floor do you ask if it loves the f*cking floor? Whatever it was, it’s stone dead now.

How do I crack myself open, Ed? How do I stop being afraid to feel? Tell me.

I’m so sorry.

Blackbeard’s Revenge, September 2018

Some friends got married recently. Well, less a traditional wedding and more of a devil’s commitment ceremony for a queer polycule. (Congrats to my assistant and the whole team, by the way.)

Point is, I stayed at this place right on the water, called something like The Harborfront Hotel, just in case you forget it’s right on the water.

It was near where I grew up, and no I’m not telling you where that is, but on the rare occasions I drove through there as a kid, I remember thinking: that’s another planet. Those are Somebodies. I’ll never touch them. I had this little scrap of red silk, trash really, probably part of some lining or something. Some kids had teddy bears, but I had this little thing. Teddy bears are comfort, but what’s comfort, really? Comfort ends. I wanted a whole different f*ckin life. So I would roll it between my fingers and imagine the insides of those rooms, imagine what the Somebodies ate and how the Somebodies talked and what drugs the Somebodies did and how the Somebodies f*cked.

I sprang for the Somebody room. I could have stayed at a roadside dump, sure. It’s where I belonged, probably, but I thought, hey, how often do I come to the land of Somebodies? So I sprang for it.

I sat on the balcony after the ceremony and it’s amazing how being there is all about the illusion of making you feel like a Somebody. They make you visible, for one—you can see the balconies from the street, so other people can see the Somebodies. I sat on the Somebody balcony for a while, listened to the water. The caution tape around the parking lot construction was blowing in the wind and I thought it was a rat in the darkness. But they wouldn’t let the rats in here, not at this hotel for Somebodies. No Rats Allowed.

There was a seagull in the pool, though. You can’t tell those guys what to do.

Anyway, inside the room, the cabinet was chintz, big chunk blasted out of the top. The comforter was scratchy and the mini fridge didn’t work and the bathroom had a coating of scum, and I thought: these aren’t Somebodies. They’re just people with $200 who don’t look where they’re going as they exit shops and wear shoes that hurt when they walk. They’re people who inspired The Harborfront Hotel to include a clause in the welcome packet in all caps about how the hotel can’t control how loud the harbor is at night.

Weird to know they’re not Somebodies and still feel like they’re Somebodies.

I’m not Somebody. The people I was raised by surely weren’t Somebodies. Which is so odd because they always seemed so big and important. Took their jobs so seriously, like they, too, thought they were Somebodies. They believed it.

My grandmother worked at a hotel for Somebodies. It’s around here somewhere, farther east, big gate out front. She worked there cleaning rooms for a hundred years, give or take, and I couldn’t afford to stay there for this trip. I know because I checked. I have never been inside that hotel. So there went my symbolic gesture. My pointless tribute.

Point is: she talked about that job like they would die without her. Now she’s dead and all they’ve done is raise the prices.

To grow up Not Somebody where I did almost certainly means you will serve the Somebodies someday. Shuck their oysters and make their lattes and scoop the seagull feathers out of their pools. I know because I went to high school with the sons of Somebodies. I was bullied by daughters of Somebodies. Kids who had pilots licenses in eleventh grade and who drove brand new Camaros because their dads owned the dealerships. I served them hamburgers in my blue uniform, clear from grease.

It’s so beautiful here. But I’ve only ever felt proximate to it. I have only ever felt like I could skin my fingers along it while passing through. Like it wasn’t for me. Like I’m set dressing for the Somebodies.

There is a yacht in the harbor called MY REALITY, too big to even bob on the ripples of the sound. Tonight, I am staring at the yacht from my balcony for Somebodies, and then tomorrow I will sit in traffic on my way home, and MY REALITY will whisk the real Somebodies far away on frictionless water.

I bought a bottle of vino verde that was on sale for $6. I want to drink it but I don’t. Does this make sense?

December 2019

Dear Ed,

Alma turned twelve. Twelve years old.

She’s growing up fast, yes. Fine, yes, I’m a cliche old dad. She said you’re gonna have to teach me how to drive soon, and we all laughed like hyenas. It’s funny because she’s right, we will. A few years, and she’ll be old enough drive a car.

She got up from the table and smoothed her shirt just like her mother does. Her mother’s face, her mother’s gestures, but with friendship bracelets all up her arm, with an obsession with Bluey she dares to call “ironic,” with chipped sparkly purple polish on her toes. The incongruity of it hit me in the solar plexus.

In four years, she’ll be old enough to drive a car. She’ll be old enough to work at Minty’s.

She won’t, of course, kids don’t do that anymore (her words), but if she did, she wouldn’t be an adult. She would be a child playacting at being an adult, practicing its rhythms, learning its frustrations, wandering around its world.

Do you ever think about how young we were, Ed?

All I’ve ever thought about until that moment was how hard I failed, but it made me think about how hard we TRIED, Ed. Do you ever think about that? How little help we had, how much we cared? How hard we loved, even though nobody showed us how?

We really did save each other. It was magic, in its way, wasn’t it? We did our best, and we tried, and god knows that’s more than most people attempt.

I miss you, Ed. There, I’ve said it. I’ve been too closed off to it to allow myself to even feel it, much less utter it. But I do, I miss you, I want to talk to you about all this, I want to explain. Not because I think I can fix the past, but because I think sometimes that you might be the person on this planet that knows me the best. Because you would say something to me that would reorient my entire perspective, because maybe we could laugh about it all now. I think we deserve to laugh about it, Ed.

There was a moment, I think, a brief and dazzling moment when I was racing to figure out who I really was before I became the person I am, and that’s when I knew you. Some days I feel like I could have that moment again, that push to evolve and change and grow, that dizzying sense of possibility, the heady rush of exploration. I think I had to be the person I am to realize that I wasn’t done figuring it out, that the race isn’t over.

She’ll go out there so soon, Ed, and if I haven’t done my job well enough, the best I can hope is that she finds someone like you.

Blackbeard’s Revenge, March 2020

way way down at the
bottom of every box
of grief I find you

Chapter 5: what it means to be living

Chapter Text

- DECEMBER -

There has been so much to do. Loose ends to tie, so, so many conversations to have, procedures to negotiate—but he does it all, he does it and he talks it through, he says things out loud and he refuses to turn away. He is done turning away.

It is not easy. But it is better.

Mary was angry, god she was angry. She had every right to be. At first there was nothing to do but endure it, absorb it, hold it. Slowly, as the days unfolded, he found the words to explain, and she found the space to let them in. No, he was not having an affair. No, not even an emotional one, not really. No, god, no, he hadn’t spoken to Ed in twenty years. And, no, it’s not about Ed specifically, not really, it’s about feeling like there is a whole person stuffed inside of you that can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t cry and sprint and laugh and drink and f*ck the way it wants to, that has been struggling to express the problem for years because on paper life is technically perfect, every little square colored in straight to the corners, every row even and neat and tidy, and yet, still—still, in spite of the fact that it will break the heart of a person it loves very, very deeply, in its own way—it wants.

So you ARE gay?

And still—STILL—he didn’t feel like that was it, or not exactly, or not completely. What he felt was more elusive, more aloof. Maybe he was gay, maybe he wasn’t. It didn’t feel like the point. He didn’t know how to express it to his wife. Which was sort of the problem, wasn’t it?

I don’t know, Mary, but I don’t want to go the rest of my life wondering. Imagine—god, it's not the same, I know, but imagine you couldn’t paint. Not for any reason, but because for the first twenty years of your life, your parents told you if you painted you'd lose everything, your family, their love, your future—and worse, you know, they never said it in so many words, but they made sure you understood so the fear could only grow and grow. Imagine if all you ever wanted in your life was to take the pictures inside your head and put them to canvas but you couldn’t. Imagine you do your spreadsheets and you make your phone calls and meet with your clients and all the while, in your head, you're only thinking about sketching them, the way the light hits their eyes or the folds of their dress, I mean, imagine yourself, Mary, lost in conversation, not listening at all, because all you can think about is the juxtaposition of the color of their shirt against the background behind them, and you know you're wrong for thinking it, and it scares you that you can’t stop because you know you’re not supposed to, but you can’t NOT, you can't STOP it, you can't just let it go—

Stede, she’d said, and he’d looked at her finally. It’s okay.

She’d left the room and it was okay, that was fine, he couldn’t begrudge her that. He breathed and breathed. She was still angry, but she’d softened slightly. Eventually she looked at him when she spoke, and she could tolerate drinking her coffee tersely so long as there was most of a room between them.

I’m going on a date with Doug, she’d announced, coffee cup vibrating in her white knuckles, and Stede’s heart ached for her. Mary, who knew him better than he knew himself, enough to ask him the question he couldn’t ask himself all the way back at the beginning; Mary, who must have spent countless nights lying there wondering why it didn’t feel the way it ought to; Mary, who had undoubtedly been so, so lonely in his presence. He was grateful to her, for her steady calm, for her impeccable parenting through it all, for the fact she would bother telling him about Doug to his face after everything he’d put them both through.

Can I say something?

If you must.

I’m glad. About your date. I’m sorry it took me so long.

She’d drained her coffee, set the mug in the sink.

Shut the f*ck up, Stede.

--

Ultimately, She’d wanted to be in the city too. That’s where the art was (and that’s where Doug was). That’s where she could go to galleries and take masterclasses and do private teaching on the side. It made what could have been an impossible situation a manageable one, and again, he found himself in her debt. So off to the city, then.

Christmas is weird—wrapped boxes next to unwrapped boxes, presents hidden amid a maze of life—but he feels free. He feels free to buy his kids what he wants to, free to spend Christmas Eve sitting on a stool at a fancy co*cktail joint, swaying to the familiar tunes and thinking about how nothing in any box could match the gift he was giving himself. Lost in thought, he taps his wedding ring against the edge of the coupe glass—except there’s no ring there, only finger. A mad laugh escapes him, a misbehaving boy in an empty church. There is an indent in his finger still and he knows Mary has one too. They’ll take time to fade, just like it’ll take time to stop thinking he should get home before she worries.

He orders another drink, some chartreuse based concoction, pale pink in the glass. It’s herbal and sweet and a gorgeous contrast to the little thing of salty-spicy nuts he’s munching on.

He is aware of warring feelings within him. One, an anxious urgency to get off this stool, walk himself home, and stare at his laptop until he figures out how to find Ed. The other, a sweet sense of anticipation that doesn’t want to be hurried.The past three months have been a barrage of feelings, and he is old enough to understand that he would be wise to let them settle a bit. There’s nowhere to go rushing off to at the moment, no feat of strength to complete. He must simply be here, in this life, all alone. He must simply do his best as he waits for the path to fully reveal itself.

And he must try to enjoy it.

He takes a long walk home in the frigid dark. He is a little bit drunk. He thinks about finally wearing the story that’s been in him all this time. He allows the city to dazzle him in a way he couldn’t let it then. The shop windows with their fake snow, the wreaths on streetlights. The smells of food from three different regions mingling. A convenience store on the corner, line of poinsettias outside wilting in the flickering glow of artificial lights. An old coffee tin outside a door, stuffed full of cigarette butts.

The cigarette butts make him think of Ed, which perhaps isn’t the most romantic of catalysts, but it’s what happens.

There is power, he thinks, in thinking about someone. That’s half of prayer, isn’t it? Thinking about someone, holding them in your mind, believing that it makes a difference to do so. After all, the only reason he’s here, smiling at nothing, walking this empty street alone, is because he has proof on his bookshelf back home that Ed had been thinking about him all these years.

Maybe for Ed it was a prayer, too.

And if it wasn’t, he can handle that. He will survive it.

But for now, it feels good to hold that hope. Warm, safe, herbal and sweet, crisp and alert, gooey, fragile, sad, wild. All once, all of those things.

He looks up at the big moon and refuses to feel shame about it. He hopes Ed is looking too. He hopes Ed can feel, across time and space and history and hurt, that Stede is thinking of him.

- MARCH -

A routine has carved itself into his new life, and he is grateful for it. It gives him more time to figure out what is next, because it is proving harder than he had thought to anticipate. The eagerness ramped up slowly, but now it’s an 18-wheeler, barreling down the interstate.

Ed’s elusive. His presence has ebbed, moth-eaten by social media as was everyone’s. Stede gets the sense the books are his focus these days. He’s run out of clues. Ed had no contact forms, no DMs open, no publicly listed email, and everything he searches turns up a dead end. It makes him want to scream, it makes him want to walk in concentric circles around his place until he runs into him by sheer chance, makes him want to start his own f*cking blog called edwhereareyouthisisstede dot com.

No. That was part of the problem last time, Stede always getting ahead of himself. Rushing and then slamming the brakes, then rushing again. This time, he conjures the image of a glider on the wind, a slow, smooth arc to his destination, floating there. He imagines landing easy, right where he means to.

And that might be possible—if only he knew where the hell he was going.

Ed posts some things after the fact, but there’s no discernible pattern Stede can suss out, places he frequents. He’s pollen in the air, making Stede itch somewhere inside, but ungraspable.

So he does what he knows how to do. He tries to follow his heart. He steps down from his role at his father’s company and hangs up the phone in the middle of his father’s tirade about it. He sorts his finances and does some freelance work and lives with a bit more restraint, which is easy without having to constantly fight the entropy of his and Mary’s old crumbling farmhouse.

He sees his kids on the weekends, because that’s what they prefer, it’s easier on their routine. He takes them on weekends, and meets them after school on Wednesdays to do something fun, because they all live close enough to allow that, and because then it feels more like three and a half days each and less like Stede’s a failure at fatherhood too. He attends games and dentist appointments and concerts, helps manage the schedule and the constant demands for new clothes and supplies, tries as best he can to take on half without stepping on toes. It’s a new sort of challenge, but he’s glad for the never-ending list of tasks. They get his mind off the wondering, for a few hours a day at least.

What he has in abundance now is time, and the wondering expands to fill the spaces he gives it. So he swims at the health club in the mornings and he tries to imagine what it would be like to slip his number to the men in the locker room but never quite feels up to it. He makes himself explore one thing in the city each week that he didn’t have the cash or freedom to explore when he was young, and he tries to imagine what it felt like to be Ed, spinning magic from the mundane and packaging it for consumption.

At night, he cooks something simple and eats it alone. He gets a glass of wine or a glass of brandy or a glass of sparkling water. He sits in his chair or in the tub or propped up in bed. He types blackbeardsrevenge dot com into his laptop or his tablet or his phone. And he catches up with his best friend.

The thing everyone is afraid to say about the Louvre is that it’s way too much f*ckin’ art, Ed says, and Stede laughs, and there is a picture of Ed mainlining a crepe on a Paris sidewalk that he stares at for a long time. I used to dream about having a little sibling, brother or sister, didn’t matter, but it would have been so much easier if there’d been someone else to protect, Ed says, and Stede has to cover his mouth with his hand, and the accompanying photo of Ed at the park, blurry with motion at dusk, is what makes him cry. I like extreme people, Ed writes. I need you to be a bit weird, I need you to be a little too much, I need you to cut the f*ck loose. The photo is a rooftop at night, Ed holding a sparkler, jumping straight up in the air so he looks like he’s floating, or in the middle of being abducted by aliens, and it makes a high giggle burst from Stede’s chest.

He reads Ed’s other books. First, I’m the Devil, a story about a man with a strange power that makes anyone who has strong feelings about him grow terminally ill and die. He spends his life orbiting the person he loves most who is only referred to as Blue, but he never speaks to the person. It’s a strange and uncomfortable book that takes place entirely on Tuesdays, something like a dark fairy tale on the lonlieness of shame. It turns Stede practically inside out with grief. He falls asleep at night for weeks thinking about those lovers reuniting, about something being strong enough to break the curse or cure the disease. The cover is two old fashioned wedding cake toppers, one with the eyes and mouth almost blacked out, and it haunts him.

Then, he reads Inn by the Sea, Ed’s most recent and a meditation on class and time and grief in which the narrator goes back to his hometown for a funeral and stays in the hotel his grandmother once worked at. It’s a fictionalized version of a post on his blog, but it reads like its own complete and new idea. The narrator can only afford the room for one night, but decides he will stay forever, Bartleby-like, and holds his ground through multiple eviction attempts until eventually the staff gives up and leaves him there alone and his body fuses with the hotel. Its obvious overlap with Ed’s blog was the source for much of the Reddit post outing Jeff and Blackbeard as one in the same.

He finds no breadcrumbs in the books. He turns, resignedly, back to the posts. He almost makes a bulletin board of potential clues, but realizes that might be toeing the line of insanity. Instead, he keeps it to his journal, Dear Ed, where are you? Is there a bar you only go to on Thursdays? Is there a farmers market you frequent? Hell, is there a sandwich you’ve eaten more than once?

He reads and reads and reads. He collects little details for the shoebox in his chest: Ed seems happiest while traveling. He waxes melancholic around September (this one hurts, but still: he tucks it gently inside the shoebox). He stops posting about romantic entanglements even vaguely in 2017.

He reads so much he begins to wish he had the luxury of rationing the posts. He is terrified to run out of words, to run out of Ed before the epiphany comes. This next post is dated only a year and a half ago, a time when Stede was so depressed he barely has memories, and a time when Ed was posting in cryptic tidbits of poetry and images without context, more of a beautiful scrapbook than any kind of decipherable narrative.

And then: a post that is different. It’s sandwiched between a post that’s entirely photographs of dubiously clever passive aggressive NO PARKING signs and a post detailing a visit to a newly-opened cat cafe that the cat cafe seems to have sponsored. It stands out for how suspiciously it feels like the old posts, the ones from way back in the beginning: Ed, out with friends, laughing and having a ball, glitter on his face and exposed chest and a sweating drink in his fist. Stede sits up. Water sloshes over the edge of the bath.

It seems to be a club, a big sprawling place with rainbows everywhere. Too old for this sh*t, it’s embarrassing, he says, right at the top, but of course he looks looser and happier than he does in every surrounding post. Men in speedos hang off him. Women lift cups above their heads. Some stairwell, white concrete, Ed looking like a passport photo except with an unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth. There is a big wide shot from a balcony of some kind, and even in it, Ed stands out right away, hands raised, mouth open, black and silver in a sea of color.

It’s undeniable. He’s bigger than life.

Thanks to my good pal John for another mind-blowing set. Can you believe we’ve known each other twenty years, brother? Everyone catch him when he comes to town.

Something clicks inside.

Twenty years.

He scrolls back up. He’d been so captivated by Ed he’d barely noticed anyone else in the pictures. DJ Foghorn? No, that doesn’t ring a bell.

He opens a photo of DJ Foghorn at his table in a new tab and zooms. There’s something in the crackle around his eyes when he smiles. And he seems … big, maybe too big, which reminds him of—

“John from Minty’s?” Stede says out loud, incredulous, voice echoing around the tile bathroom.

He goes back to the post, scrolls through looking at other faces. A second glance at a photo near the bottom knocks the breath out of him.

Ed at the center, looking smug, arms wide. To his left: Izzy, Jim, Archie, Olu, Fang. To his right, John, Zheng, Frenchie, Roach. Everyone, together. The caption reads Annual family reunion.

Annual.

He sits up, more water sloshing, and searches John.

His search takes him to Instagram, where he logs into his long-neglected account and is bombarded with months of notifications and messages and follows. He ignores them finds John’s page.

It’s party after party after party, neon and darkness, bodies writhing, glitter, noise, a dozen cities, and—there. The party that matches Ed’s blog. A club in town, The Antique Shop. Further sleuthing reveals he does sets there regularly, twice a year roughly, calls them Homecoming Sets. And every time, the whole crew turns out, dressed to kill, rainbows on their faces, drinks in their hands. They hug and they kiss on the mouth and they do funny dances and Stede cannot believe he scrolled through these posts without realizing it was everyone. He feels a surge of longing within him, a feeling almost indistinguishable from loss.

They are together—still, after all these years—and he is alone.

But no, he realizes, shoving a stick in the spokes of his own relentless anxiety. He belonged with them once. If one of them showed up at random in his life, wouldn’t he be thrilled to see them again?

He won’t let the fear win again. Yes, it feels like loss, and maybe it was, once. Maybe even as soon as six months ago. But he has made space in his life to allow for possibility.

He holds in his mind hope in the place of history.

Back at John’s instagram, he finds his website, looks at upcoming dates. There are so many of them, blocks with neon lineart of headphones, or strange doodles of skulls eating other skulls, on and on and on until—

- JUNE-

The rain is probably a bad omen. It is, right? It’s the sideways kind, the umbrella defying kind. A miserable night, a night to burrow into the couch with a book, a night to let something bubble on the stove, surely. Not a night to put on clothes, not a night to go out there and risk a minutely specific heartbreak you’ve been avoiding for twenty years. Surely.

His phone pings and he’s annoyed before he even checks it because he already knows who it will be.

yr going right

say yes this instant or i’m calling

He’d invited Lucius to John’s set back during some distant unthinkable before, back when he felt like he could do this, which in retrospect is a good sign he’d been severely dehydrated or possibly sleepwalking. Lucius had declined, citing existing travel plans that weekend, but evidently a vacation wasn’t enough to keep him from crawling up Stede’s ass about it.

Worse, he seemed to be running some sort of countdown timer on his phone, as though Stede needed the goddamn reminder. Twenty days, dove, how are we feeling, and Oooh, only two weeks! You doing your stretches? So of course he knew today was the proverbial day, the one where either Stede got to sort some things out, or humiliate himself in front of all his former friends.

yes, I’m going, he replies with an eye roll.

outfit picture now

how are you more demanding than two preteens

i can be worse, if you like

In spite of himself, he smiles at his phone. Admittedly, choosing the outfit took a lot out of him. He suspects that Lucius knows as much. It had been difficult to imagine what he wanted to look like when he wasn’t sure who he wanted to be. He’d started by trying on two outfits at wildly differing poles, both at the extreme ends of the spectrum of how he thinks of himself. On one end, the sort of outfit he would wear to work every day—clean, pressed, plain. On the other, the choicer cuts, the way he would dress if the world were totally different. Bright colors and loud prints and things Mary had dismissed as too much.

Eventually, he lands in the middle: something a little daring, but still him. He feels like himself but more. Lighter.

Lucius approves.

even I would f*ck you in that. and before you say ‘that’s not a high bar’ or whatever bitchy thing you’re thinking, pete said he would too

He rolls his eyes, clicks the top right button, and sticks his phone in his bag.

The place looks like nothing—a bland front, a single door marked only by a few stanchions—until he steps inside. The neon pulses with the music. The bouncer is the biggest man he’s ever seen wearing the smallest shirt he’s ever seen. The atmosphere is sickly sweet with liquor. Through the curtain, he sees a blur of skin.

He makes a face about it, but produces his ID as requested. There is a poster of John in dramatic blue to his left, stars around his eye. He looks extraordinary.

“You know, I worked with him when we were kids. Fast food,” Stede says, as the bouncer examines his ID under a light they didn’t have ten years ago.

The bouncer grunts and hands the ID back.

It’s earlyish, but not too early. The plan is to secure a seat by the bar, stay inconspicuous, watch. He has to tell himself that not going through with it is an option, or he would never have gotten his shoes on. He has come this far, he reminds his nervous system. So, so far.

The inside is a vast concrete box bathed in violet light, pristinely square, industrial and sparse. To the left, a dance floor with a stage way at the far end interrupted by four massive columns. There are stairs at the edge of the stage, and his eyes follow them up to a narrow balcony wrapping around the second floor. Along the wall opposite the stage, to his right, stacked up crates and chairs and sundries all bolted together somehow form makeshift bleachers. It’s controlled chaos, a fascinating and clever juxtaposition to the otherwise sparse space. It looks rickety, but it doesn’t budge as people climb up and sit to watch and sip their drinks.The bar is straight ahead along the far wall. The concrete floor along the bar is painted in the style of an old Moroccan runner rug, and the bar top is covered in antique looking lamps with campy shades. It’s not crowded yet. There are a few open stools at the corner, perfect for surreptitious observation; Ed will surely head to the bar at some point.

“Gin and tonic, please,” Stede says, for some reason afraid to order something more complicated. He has the feeling of being a houseguest, like he ought to ask whether he should remove his shoes. The gin is cheap and the tonic is too sweet but it’s something to calm him down.

“Well well f*ckin’ well.”

This, he had not prepared himself for. In his mind, there had been only Ed. And John, of course, on some distant stage, serenading them. Despite some recent growth spurts, he is still, at heart, an idiot.

Izzy Hands pulls out the stool next to Stede and climbs on.

“Hands!” The bartender shrieks, jumping up and down and clapping. Her top is such that Stede worries a nipple might make an appearance, but everything stays put. She smiles big, leans over and gives Izzy a kiss on the cheek. It occurs to Stede for the very first time that he’s probably just as well known around town as Ed is. “Tonic and lime, love?”

“Perfect. And you can put this asshole’s drinks on my tab.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“You’ll thank me when he ruins your night,” Izzy says ominously. “Anne, Mary, this is my old friend Stede Bonnet. Knew him back in the dark ages.”

Mary gives a disinterested wave and goes back to work, but Anne seems keenly interested.

“Friend of Eddie’s?” Anne leans forward, inspecting him, rubbing his shirt between her fingers. “He always had a type.”

“Sort of,” Stede says, blushing.

“You two used to f*ck?”

“No!”

“Yes,” Izzy says wearily.

“KNEW IT,” she shrieks. Mary high fives her without looking. She moves down the bar to keep working.

“Well, that was lovely,” Stede sneers.

“See, this was always the f*ckin’ problem with you, you can’t take a f*ckin’ joke.”

“Oh, like you’re one to talk, every time I was around you practically had a DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging on your face.”

“Fair.“ Izzy chuckles, sips his drink. “Waited a long time to hear you to throw it back at me. Always wanted a proper nemesis.”

“I never understood why you hate me so much.”

“Don’t hate you, Bonnet. Didn’t even then, really. Only hated the way you thought you knew everything. And the way you couldn’t admit you were angry, like you were the only person on earth who didn’t feel that emotion. Moping around, like suffering was cumulative for you and no one else. And your little f*ckin’ outfits. Oh, god, and the way you always—“

“Alright, alright. I was annoying, I get it. Rest assured, nobody is more annoyed by me than me.”

Izzy grins. He slurps through his straw. His drink is gone already. “Only thing I f*ckin’ hate about this sh*t now. Ten years sober, and so sick of f*ckin’ tonic water I yearn to drink my own piss.”

“Wow,” Stede says, ignoring the back quarter of the sentence, “I imagine these evenings can be a lot to put up with sober.”

“Someone’s f*ckin’ got to.”

His stomach drops. He has to close his eyes. He thinks he might fall off the barstool.

“So Ed’s not coming.”

“Might come. Sometimes does. Never know. Either way, someone’s gotta do the f*ckin’ work. You know, it’s not your fault Bonnet, but you’re getting the prepared rant anyway because it pisses me off. Yeah, Ed’s the tall pretty charismatic one, yeah everyone swoons when he hits the dance floor, but who do you think found the parties? Who do you think lined up the photos, told him who to chat to, told him what to say to the media? Who do you think did a pass of all his posts to make sure he seemed sober enough in them? He’s not f*ckin’ Blackbeard, WE are Blackbeard. Fifty per cent of the labor of that operation is invisible and guess who does it. Sober.”

“Wow. I suppose I never did realize it.”

“Eh,” he says, flagging Anne down for another round, “never wanted the fame anyway. I suppose everyone who doesn’t have it says that, but I think it’s true. I was always more interested in the creation of it anyway. I wanted to light HIM, I wanted to frame HIM, I wanted to edit and polish HIS thoughts from HIS lunatic f*ckin’ brain.”

“There really is something about him, isn’t there.”

“Yeah. Unfortunately there’s no denying it. Wish there were, most days.”

“So, what, you show up, take some photos, send him notes about the vibe?”

“Please don’t ever say vibe, Bonnet. But yes, basically. He spins some f*cking yarn, talks about his precious doe-eyed feelings, people eat it up, we move on to the next one.”

“It’s funny, I read through his blog. He mentioned feeling like he might as well be a cursed suit.”

“Heh. I remember that one. Some annoying endless single paragraph wank about the misery of dating. It was only a week after the first event he wrote about that he hadn’t attended. Had bronchitis or something. He was sh*tting his pants someone would realize he never showed, but half the comments were people claiming to have talked to him. Think it bruised his tender ego. Now, of course, half the damn posts are me, nobody notices, and he resents me more by the day for it. The internet is so stupid. All empty worship, all a way to avoid having any f*ckin’ interiority of your own.”

“Mmm,” Stede allows.

The second gin and tonic is much stronger, and he thanks Anne. She calls him a flirt, winks at him.

“So why now,” Izzy says, louder, as the first DJ of the evening has begun his set. Stede desperately wishes he didn’t understand the question.

“Well, it’s … complicated.”

“Finally realize you’re gay?”

“Not exactly, no.”

“You know I looked you up.”

“Oh?”

“You got two beautiful f*ckin’ kids, a way hotter wife than you deserve and talented to boot, you’ve got money, status, freedom. What the f*ck are you doing skulking around a converted warehouse owned by insane lesbians with an antique fetish?”

Izzy gestures toward them and Mary is opening a can of PBR with a knife three times the size needed for a task that does not require a knife at all.

“She’s, erm. No longer my wife, actually,” he says sipping his drink.

Izzy’s eyebrows go all the way up.

“Oh. I see. So you really did realize you’re gay then.”

“Realized I had some … unresolved issues.”

“That’s one way to f*ckin’ put it, sure.”

“You disagree?”

“Course not. I mean, you obviously read the lunatic’s posts. Something about you got in his f*ckin’ head, you know? Nobody else came close. Never opened his idiot heart again. Refused to. Drove me to f*ckin’ drink. Then to miserable, endless sobriety.”

Stede laughs softly, and Izzy smiles, and it feels like they’re old friends, but not the regular way. It’s like they’re the obverse of each other, each trying and failing to make heads or tails of Ed Teach. Suddenly, he isn’t scared. Suddenly, he feels like he can risk the big questions.

“Did you love him?”

“Thought I did,” Izzy allows. “Once.”

Stede doesn’t push.

Something tingles at the edges of his brain. He can’t quite see the shape of it yet.

“So does he not come to John’s sets anymore? After I started sleuthing, I thought this was my best bet. Always seems like a little reunion of sorts.”

“Well. Used to, yeah. Honestly, it was a good bet. I give your sleuthing a reluctant B+.”

“Except?”

Izzy sighs, and this time it doesn’t feel like his shield. It feels like the shield drops away.

“Past year, lot of things went to sh*t. Dunno if he’s having a midlife crisis or something obnoxious, but he’s not the same.”

“What happened?”

“Burned all his goodwill. Alienated himself. Half-asses everything, sometimes quarter-asses it. He’s been mean, petty, boorish to everyone within spitting distance. It’s almost like he WANTS to lose everything, like he wants to be fired or something. Jokes on him, of course, he works for himself, but he doesn’t have the guts to be a good boss, so I guess we’re both gonna circle this drain for a while.”

“Wow.”

“Frenchie hasn’t come around in a year, Archie refuses to speak to him. Fang shows up occasionally, but only to see me, avoids Ed if he can. Hell, even Jim quit. Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Quit?” It takes a second, as Izzy watches on, but the penny drops. “Oh! Jim was his assistant!”

“You got there. Fascinating to watch that hamster in your brain run in real time. And yes, Jim was his personal assistant. Someone’s gotta get the camera repaired when he drops it in the toilet. Someone’s gotta get the vomit out of the leather.”

“Woof.”

“Woof is right. Amazed they lasted as long as they did. Good kid. Hope life treats them better than f*ckin’ Ed did.”

“I didn’t know any of that.”

“Wow, you really don’t stay in touch with anyone, do you? Assumed it was just me, for obvious reasons.”

“Not really,” Stede says, all that sugary tonic congealing into guilt.

“Why not?”

“Hard to say,” he says, really considering it for what might be the first time. “Ed was so … so big, you know? Took up all the space, all the air. I didn’t think there was any left for me, at the time. Even if I tried, I’d never been as cool and fun as Ed. Had this sense that every time I spoke, people were just waiting for me to finish so they could go back to paying attention to Ed. It always made me feel—“

“Alright, settle down, Bonnet, I’m not your therapist.”

Stede laughs. Clinks his glass to Izzys.

“That why you ran?”

“It’s why I ran, it’s why I stayed away, it’s why it took me all this time to try again. I thought I was doing the right thing. Thought everyone was better off. I thought everyone wanted me to go.”

“Wrong.”

“Well. If you say so."

“Okay, listen you twat, I do f*ckin’ say so.” He slams his hand flat down on the bar. “The time we lived in, the way the world treated queers? The sh*t we were vulnerable to, the way people smiled at our faces and sneered and laughed as we turned our backs, the little f*ckin’ jokes. All you thought about was the parties because you felt left out, but that’s because you didn’t see what we were trying to make, the life we curated with our bare f*ckin’ hands. I’d sit there on Sunday mornings deleting hateful, disgusting comments from bigots on posts about people just trying to have a good time, because I wanted a place on the internet to go to look at people having a good f*ckin’ time. It was a RISK, Bonnet, a real risk. And we pulled it off, okay, we changed sh*t. And you know why? Because we understood that it’s not about the fame or the f*ckin’ glory, or even,” he pauses to nod in acknowledgement as Anne tops them up, “getting free drinks at places like this.”

“FREE? I thought you were covering my tab!”

“Not the point, Bonnet,” Izzy says, but Stede can see his smirk. “The point is that it’s about belonging to something. And you f*ckin’ belong to it, like it or not.”

The place is getting crowded now, a constant stream of people getting drinks beside him, leaning over the bar to shout orders.

“I thought I was doing the right thing. Getting out of the way so everyone could live their lives. I thought I was doing something brave.”

“No,” Izzy says. “This is brave. Coming back is brave. Idiot.”

Stede considers it a moment. Maybe it IS brave to go back and try to make things right. Lord knows his father never had. Lord knows it would have been easier not to.

“John’s about to start,” Izzy says. “Gonna go say hi, and get my normal shots from the greenroom, so it looks like someone in this f*ckin’ world still likes Ed.”

“Do you know where I can find him?”

“No. Doesn’t answer my texts unless he feels like it. And it’s not my place to tell him you’re looking.” He winks. “Nice catching up with you, you twat.”

Izzy turns to go, and that fuzzy thing comes into focus. He grabs at Izzy’s shoulder.

“Wait, sorry,” he says. “Did you… did you, by any chance, send me a book? One of Ed’s? Someone bought a copy of Turtle Vs. Crab, had it held at my local bookshop.”

“Like I said. You and him has always been none of my business. Maybe reach out to some of your old friends, Bonnet.”

“Thanks,” Stede says. “Really. I think I needed this.”

“I’d say me too, but that would be patronizing.” He waves to Anne and Mary. Anne blows a kiss. “Have a lovely night.”

The first DJ has been replaced as if by magic by the second DJ. He checks his watch. Twenty minutes to John. He scans the dance floor. It’s mobbed with people now, but he’d see Ed if he were here. He’d know.

He unearths his phone. A text from Alma that’s just a close up blurry photo of her brother either screaming or laughing or crying. He smiles and leaves her a heart.

He considers his next move. Then, he resigns himself to it.

“I cannot believe I’ve sunken low enough to be taking advice from that man,” he mutters, opening Instagram. “Humiliating.”

He takes his time with it, perusing grids before following or sending requests. He should probably send some messages, too, but he’s not quite ready for that. Fang has a lovely garden. Roach runs a food truck that seems to do great business around farmers markets in the area. Frenchie posts only once every other month, usually a picture of a field or a tree, occasionally a basket or an old barn, like a mysterious pilgrim with a smart phone. Jim appears to be teaching kids how to fight now, headless photos of tiny legs on plush mats, accompanied by words about technique.

Stede’s feed is, by far, the most soulless. He stopped posting a year or two ago, depending on how you count, which was, itself, a year or two after he stopped feeling good about posting his kids without their consent. It was a gradual slowdown after that, because what else was there? The books he reads, the intermittent letters he writes to Ed, the clothes in the half of his closet he hadn’t touched until he came out tonight? Even when he was posting more regularly, there was no sense of what he enjoys, or how he spends his down time.

He thinks about what he would post now, that he’s alone. The bodega selling poinsettias—he’d even taken some pictures. The corners of his apartment that are reaching doneness maybe—pictures hung, furniture and throw pillows in place. He’s been having fun with the interior, sure. His pretty calathea?

A sense of futility moves through him. What’s he trying to prove here? What he’d deep-down hoped for but would never have voiced even to himself was that tonight would be like jumping in a pool: a swift single motion that would change the state of things. One by one, they would all come in, see him and scream, they would hug, they might even cry. At the end, a big group photo, everyone peaco*cking, mouths open because the laughter was too big to keep inside.

And after that? Ed on the dance floor, arms up, free. Ed’s back, beneath a streetlight, middle finger over his shoulder as he walks ahead. Ed, bright lit inside the poinsettia bodega, buying cigarettes he swears he doesn’t smoke anymore. Ed, Ed, Ed.

Ed, who isn’t here. Ed, who'd shattered that precious bubble months ago.

He should go. He turns on his stool, contemplating the crowd, strategizing his exit to incur minimal humiliation.

Up on the balcony, he sees Izzy knock on a door. He’s got a big camera around his neck, and he shifts from foot to foot looking grumpy. The door to what is presumably the green room opens and out comes John, smiling so big his eyes are basically closed. He lifts Izzy off the ground in a hug, like something out of a romcom almost. He sets him down, claps him on the shoulder, and holds the door open. Just as Izzy’s about to disappear into the green room, he catches Stede’s eye and gives him a wink.

It snaps him out of it. This is what he always does. People make time and space for him, and what does he do? He convinces himself it’s not real, or that they didn’t mean it, or that he doesn’t deserve it. He decides he will only wind up hurt. And then he retreats.

This is his first real chance at finding Ed, and he’s about to blow it because he’s afraid to take the risk? Absolutely not, he thinks. He pulls out his phone again, opens Instagram.

The whole reason he’s at this bar alone is to take some risks.

He sends a round of friend requests. Everyone he used to know, everyone in this odd little circle. He likes the photos he was looking at earlier. Leaves a comment on a photo of Fang’s dog.

A little one appears by his message icon. His heart races even as he tries not to get his hopes up.

eyyyy Stede! weird i was JUST talking about you the other day. how are you, amigo?

Jim was just talking about him the other day. The other day! His old friend Jim! He feels his face pull out of its tailspin. He sits a bit taller.

“‘Nother round, sweet pea?”

“You know what, I think I will, thanks.”

so lovely to hear that, he types. and I hope you’re well! I was so sad to miss you at John’s show tonight, i'd been really hoping to see you. izzy was just catching me up, i understand things are a bit different these days

It’s only a few seconds before the dots appear. Jim must be online now, he thinks.

if you and izzy are cool things really are different 😂

i’m learning perhaps we have more in common than i suspected…

heh, Jim says, and then the typing bubble appears and disappears a few times.

i think over time we all discovered what we have in common is not understanding what the f*ck ed’s problem is. maybe you just got there first

That one hurts. But he reminds himself that what Jim probably doesn’t know—what Stede suspects nobody else knows—is that Stede is the only one who understands exactly what the f*ck Ed’s problem is.

He breathes through the pang of guilt, and then steels himself. That’s exactly what he’s here trying to make right.

“I am human,” he mutters into his gin. “And I made a mistake.”

what happened with you two, if you don’t mind me asking? i know you were his assistant for a while, and even before that, i always thought of you two as kindred spirits

It’s a while this time before the dots turn into words.

yeah, until I tried to get real with him. told him he was phoning in everything but the drinking and he told me to mind my business. i said it was my f*ckin business if I have to interact with him every day. told him if he’s too pissed half the time to tell me what he needs me to do then he can’t get mad when I don’t f*ckin do it. told him I was tired of him taking out his own incompetence on me. was so angry too because i’d just read his stupid f*ckin brilliant book even tho he told me not to. i loved it, it f*ckin changed my life, which was the last thing he wanted to hear, apparently. held it in my hand, shook it around like a lunatic, told him THIS was the man i wanted to work for, THIS was the man I wanted to be like, not some loser who can barely sustain eye contact long enough to yell at me. told him I felt like he’d had it out for everyone since you left and the book was proof and that he needs to f*ckin deal with that. he said if i said another word i’d be fired. told him to save his rancid breath

Stede reads it twice, gives it a moment to settle. He’s thinking about what to say when the dots reappear.

and then yeah I had my one little act of spite

Stede’s head whips up so fast he almost teeters backwards off his stool.

you called my bookshop and bought a copy of the book for me

An angel emoji.

how did you know which bookstore I shopped at?

stede you are not a difficult man to track down. you were in like. 3 bookclubs there. they tagged you in photos almost every week

There’s no way that’s correct. He goes to his page, taps the icon for tagged photos. He doesn’t even have to scroll before he sees one.

seems I’m not great at checking my notifications

lol

listen, i hate to ask, because i know i haven’t exactly been a good friend to you, and because i know you and ed are on the outs, but I’m wondering if you could help me get in touch with him. i’d really like to talk to him about all of this

u said yr at john’s set?

yes, but he isn’t here

well, he didn’t change the stupid password, so I can tell you he’s there somewhere

In the chat, a screenshot from a rideshare company appears: RIDE COMPLETED and a timestamp of half an hour ago, this address.

This time Stede does fall off his stool. His arm lands in something sticky. Someone’s taken his seat before he can even get up and brush himself off.

“Asshole,” he says with a frown, yanking his bag off the hook.

“Going so soon, loverboy,” Anne teases.

“No, no, just—“ he gets cut off, swept away in a throng of people. He raises an arm above his head by way of goodbye, but he doesn’t care. Anne isn’t real and neither is the man on his stool, and neither is the Jim inside his phone, which he shuts off and shoves in his pocket. He heads for the bathroom, scrubs his forearm where he landed in someone else’s drink, sorts out his hair, splashes some water on his face. The other person drying their hands exits and for twenty seconds, he is alone.

The man in the mirror is older, worn like an old sweater, but comfortable like one, too. He stands taller than he used to. His spine, despite the years, is straighter.

The bass and the voices beat against the door. The bathroom is twenty degrees colder than the dance floor. The mirrors are scratched and the concrete walls are painted pale baby pink, like he’s being born again.

Ed is here.

His heart screams alive.

He exhales, big and slow and intentional. He centers himself.

He would see him if he were on the dance floor. He would.

John’s set is going steady, the bodies bouncing and writhing, ignoring his polite excuse-me-s and pardons. He does a lap of the entire perimeter, glancing behind columns, across the throng, into the curtained off areas near the stage. There is no sign of Ed.

Desperate, he bribes a bouncer on the second floor for a glimpse inside the green room, but it’s a waste of fifty bucks because Ed isn’t in there. He goes all the way around the balcony, searching with increasing despair for that wild hair, those fathomless eyes.

But Ed isn’t there.

He stops, breathes deep.

He told himself he wouldn’t get his hopes up tonight. He told himself he would accept what came.

If Ed’s not ready to be found, then Ed isn’t ready to be found. When the moment is right, it will make itself obvious. He must trust that.

He watches John for a long moment. He’s in his element, bobbing his head, snaking back and forth across the decks, occasionally smiling at his own cleverness. It’s a joy to watch, and he can picture it at another time, in another world. He can see all of them out there on the floor, front and center, half dancing, half goofing, making each other laugh. Jim with blacklight hair dye, Ed whipping his hair back and forth, Fang in a harness, Izzy taking photos.

He’s too late. Again.

Dejected, minutes from tears, he heads down the stairs. The idea of fighting his way to the opposite corner to leave seems excruciating. He holds up his phone near the bouncer by the fire door, mouths the word emergency, and the man nods once, hits the fire bar with a closed fist, and goes back to scanning the crowd.

Stede steps out. The rain has slowed to a not-unpleasant trickle that feels cool and welcome after the crowded hot dance floor. He’s in something of an alley between the club and the apartment building in the next lot. He realizes, as soon as the fresh air hits and the adrenaline drains from him that he is a little bit tipsy. Ah, well, he thinks, another opportunity to enjoy a long walk in the—

A skinny trail of cigarette smoke snakes its way from a figure sitting hunched on the curb halfway between the door and the corner, and the universe goes deadly quiet. For three whole seconds his brain won’t believe it. There is only the patter of rain on the pavement and the whoosh of screaming life inside his body.

The streetlights lean in, as though to listen.

“Ed?”

“f*ck off.”

That growl. It makes his hair stand on end.

The rain picks up again. He can’t help but feel like they’re causing it, like it’s coming from inside them.

He takes a step closer, unsure how to announce himself without scaring Ed. There is a part of his brain that still refuses to believe it. His body knows, though. His chest aches with it. His blood sings with it.

“Ed,” he says, voice nearly a whisper, soft and malleable against the angular sounds from within the club, “it’s me. I’m here.”

His head lifts but he doesn’t turn. The rain comes and comes, like the sky lets go of it all at once, everything it’s held for them.

Ed leaps to standing, cigarette falling into the gutter.

“No,” he says, eyes like a horror movie, face half-hidden in the darkness, “no, NO. I f*ckin’ knew, I KNEW there was a reason I shouldn’t have come—NO. f*ck this. f*ck you.

He jams his hands in his pockets and starts for the street. There is a split second where Stede almost gives up, crumbles, bursts into tears, but then he remembers: Ed didn’t drive here. He will either walk somewhere or have to wait for a car or a bus or a train, and so he goes jogging after, falling in step half behind him, half beside.

“Ed, please.”

Up close, the liquor wafts off him and Stede can tell he’s been crying by the way he sniffles. The leather looks miserable in the rain, but it concentrates the smell. The jacket is different—expensive, probably designer—but it’s still Ed all over, every inch of it. The smoke and the cologne and the products in his hair, sure, but also that intractable unknowable Edness. It does something to Stede’s reserves, makes him stronger than he feels, Popeye eating spinach. They know each other better than anyone. They’ve walked together through hell. It’s gonna take a whole lot more than a bad attitude to shake him off.

Ed walks faster as Stede gains on him. The rain is a violent thing, pounding sense into them. A car passes and illuminates the alleyway; there is mud on their trousers, their shoes. His hair is long, down his back, heavy with rainwater.

Ed pulls out his cigarettes and a lighter. He attempts the impossible task of lighting the cigarette in this deluge while still walking fast enough to evade Stede. His hands shake as he tries to flick the lighter. The lighter won’t catch. The cigarette sags with water. The whole exercise is toddler-like in its spiteful determination, so obviously futile as to be absurd. Stede can’t help but laugh.

“Ed, stop this, stop it now,” he says, finally, jogging through an ankle-deep puddle to get in front of him. “Be sensible, please.”

Ed’s refusing to look at him, head between his hands, wet cigarette between the fingers on his left hand, lighter clutched in his right. He sighs angrily, petulant, and Stede can’t stand this a second longer, it’s too much.

He takes Ed’s hands gently in his and lowers them.

“Would you look at me, please?”

Ed rolls his eyes up into the pouring rain, but after that, they do land on Stede, at last. For a split second, all the other people he carries around disappear, and he’s not Blackbeard, he’s not Jeff Thatch, he’s not some club kid, and he’s not the aging ghost of one either—he’s a boy who, despite all his elaborate protestations, wears his goddamn heart on his goddamn sleeve.

And just as fast, it’s gone.

“What the f*ck are you doing here, Stede.” He is trying to sound angry, but Stede can tell he isn’t angry, he’s sad.

“Trying to talk to you. Please let me. Let’s get out of the rain. There’s a diner on 14th, can we go get a burger? Please.”

Ed doesn’t move, doesn’t relent, doesn’t say anything.

“Your treat,” Stede adds, and dares to lift one corner of his mouth.

Ed doesn’t break—doesn’t even flinch, a credit to his poker face—but Stede can tell by the way he ducks his head and starts walking with purpose that he was about to.

There are only two other tables with people at them in the whole place, and Stede can’t immediately tell whether that’s good or bad.

Ed looks worse in the harsh diner lighting, but Stede probably does, too. As the server leads them to their table, a person follows behind them mopping away their water trail like they were NBA players sweating all over the court (Alma has been watching a lot of basketball). The menus take up all the table between them. Stede studies it because for all the times he imagined this, he somehow still has no idea what comes next.

“Not sure why I look at this thing,” he says, to say something. “I order a tuna melt every time.”

“Only safe option. A tuna melt is a tuna melt is a tuna melt.”

“True. It’s never failed me,” Stede says. He doesn’t look up from the menu because Ed said a non-hostile sentence and it will shatter at his feet if he notices. “I guess it’s sort of hard to mess up. Mayo, vinegar, celery, cheese.”

“Oh, mate, that’s not true. There are so many wrong ways. Tuna to bread ratio can sometimes be WAY off. Sometimes the cheese is so unmelty it’s basically a sandwich. And don’t get me f*ckin’ started on the psychos who serve them closed-faced.”

“You just said a tuna melt is a tuna melt.”

“Yeah okay, I did,” he says, turning the page of his enormous menu, “but it’s like pizza and sex, right, when it’s bad it’s still okay. Of course, one in every twenty you get one so bad it’s actually offensive, this one time in Roswell at that stupid alien diner they have down there—”

“Gentlemen? What would ye like?”

Stede has no idea how long the server has been there because he’d been staring at Ed, smiling like he just hit a game-winning Hail Mary mid-court buzzer beater (he has got to stop thinking about basketball).

“Or do ye two need … a moment,” the server says cryptically, seemingly fighting his Scottish brogue. His eyes stare at nothing. A drop of his spittle lands on the table.

“Naw, mate, we’re good,” Ed says, closing his menu with a slap. “I’ll have the pancakes, blueberries please, extra syrup, fried egg. He’ll have the tuna melt, extra melty if you can, fries?”

“Fries,” Stede says, stunned. Ed used to order for him, and it thrilled him then. It’s something he didn’t remember he remembered.

“Fries,” Ed says. “And I’m gonna need a Sam Adams for this. Sam Adams? Two Sam Adams.”

“Extra … melty,” the server says, considering the request carefully although not writing anything down. “Aye.”

He takes the menus and leaves them. The silence is loud after the club. He’s sure now: he wishes the place were bustling. Anxious words fall from his mouth.

“Ed, listen. I don’t want to do it all right here, right this second, I just wanted to, I guess, open a door. I can talk if you like, I can answer questions, I can sit here in silence, or I can tell you some things about my life now, what’s on my mind, I can—“

“I think you should dance for me,” Ed says.

“I—what?”

“Dance. Or I guess sing, if that’s better for you. Maybe act out a scene from a play. Beckett, maybe. Or Pinter, I’m not picky. Can you juggle? I think salt pepper and ketchup would be fun.”

“Sorry. I’m nervous.”

“I know,” Ed says softly.

“Two Samuel Adams. Or is the plural Sams Adams?” The server places two pints before them. “Samuels Adams,” he mutters to no one, walking away. “Samuel Adamses.”

Ed takes a sip. He sits like a kid, looking down, hands in his lap. There are droplets of water on the table from his hair.

“Ed, I just want to say that—“

“Nope.”

“Well, I mean it’s just that I’m sorry for—“

“NO.”

“Will you just let me try to—“

“PASS.”

“Edward, I’m trying to tell you I—“

“Ah-maaaaaze iiiing graaace—“

“Oh, please, this is ridiculous we can just—“

Ed makes a buzzer sound so loud Stede almost jumps out of his booth.

“You didn’t even ask me a—“

“Nope! Nope nope nope.”

“Fine, if you insist, I’ll talk about—“

“REJECTED.”

“THE WEATHER, I WILL TALK ABOUT THE RAIN WE ARE HAVING.”

Stede’s chest is heaving and he’s red in the face and the diners at both other tables are paused, forks in hands, watching. The server stands behind the counter by the register, eyebrows up in space, whittling something as he pretends not to be listening.

“f*ck off,” Ed says to the room, voice like a scythe, and off they f*ck.

“Ed—”

“Would you let it f*ckin’ be? Would you take a deep f*ckin’ breath and trust me here? A little? I’m sitting at the f*ckin’ table, aren’t I? I mean it, mate, for one f*ckin’ second stop trying to change the past and close your eyes. Breathe. Do it. Christ.”

Stede does it, if for no other reason than to stop the tears from coming.

Ed’s right, but then, Ed’s always right. What’s more is Ed’s not on his timeline and he shouldn’t be. There wasn’t urgency for him. He hadn’t just flung himself into the void and hoped for the best the way Stede had.

No. Ed had been in the void for years. He knows, he’s read the posts.

He breathes. He breathes in until he thinks his lungs might pop. He squeezes all his muscles and releases them, the way the meditation app he’d used precisely six times had told him to.

It’s the first conversation, he tells himself on exhale. And Ed was playing with him, bantering about tuna melts. That’s worth more than everything he left behind.

The food arrives, jolting him out of his haze. He holds on to his center as the server sets everything down, replaces their ketchup with a fuller ketchup, pours two glasses of water, and finally, at long last, leaves them.

“You’re right,” Stede says, settling a napkin over his lap like he has any hope of retaining his dignity, “and I’m sorry.”

Ed lifts a finger.

“For pushing! Just now! That’s all I’m sorry for, just—just pushing. So I won’t do that anymore. No more apologies, I promise.”

Satisfied, Ed tucks a napkin into his shirt. It’s so preciously specific, so instantly unforgettable, so sublimely endearing it changes everything, instantly.

There is nothing to be afraid of.

“I get overwhelmed, I think,” he says, watching Ed hold the little dripping syrup packet until the drip slows to nothing, “because. Because it’s just that I love everything about you. I love being near you. Breathing the same air. It’s nice.”

He’s expecting to be told off again, but Ed only sets the syrup cup down and makes what might be the saddest smile Stede’s ever seen. It lasts for a moment but reaches back through twenty years, down into the roots in him. It’s a strange and awkward new thing to translate the inside of his heart to words this way. To his surprise, they fall untroubled from his tongue, a sweet exhalation, easy as breathing.

“Air smells like tunafish,” Ed says as he digs into his pancakes.

Stede chuckles, but leaves it there for a moment, forcing himself to eat a few bites he doesn’t taste. It’s Ed who breaks the calm silence.

“Don’t exactly know what the f*ck I’m supposed to say either, here. Feel like I dunno anything about you, but you’ve gotten to witness an extended twenty-year temper tantrum.”

“If you’re referring to your website, Ed, that’s not a tantrum, it’s art, it’s—it’s moving, it’s provocative, it’s—“

“Stop.”

He doesn’t know whether to say it. So he says it.

“I read your novels.”

Ed freezes.

“We don’t have to talk about it, it just feels, I dunno, wrong somehow, I suppose, to sit here knowing it and not tell you.”

“So you kept f*ckin’ tabs on me all those years and never once thought to reach out?”

“No, actually. I couldn’t, it was too painful. Not sure whether I should say this—I’m sort of going without a script here, but, erm. Jim sent me Turtle Vs. Crab. After they quit.”

His fork clatters down to his plate and Stede flinches.

“Of f*ckin’ course,” he says, head in his hands.

“Please don’t be mad at them,” Stede says. “I know it can’t be easy for you to hear that, but it changed everything. I read back through the entire archive after that, plus your other books. It was powerful, it spurred me to change my life, Ed. To move back to the city.”

There is so much more to say. And stopping himself from saying it all—from apologizing and groveling and over-explaining—it’s like stopping a freight train with outstretched hands.

Ed’s right, though. He can’t fix this with talking. He can fix it with listening. With time. With all the time he’s taken, surely he can find some to give. He can’t change the past. He’s been trying to change it his whole life. Enough.

He thinks back to his darkest moments, his loneliest hours, when Mary was off living her rich full life and the kids were occupied and he sat alone in his study, too afraid to open his computer because he knew in such a vulnerable state he would navigate straight to Ed’s blog, too wired to read, too sad to drink, too jittery to sleep, too guilty to enjoy himself. What did he want, in those moments? Did he want to lay it all at Ed’s feet and give Ed sole discretion to redeem his soul or remand him to hell?

No. He wanted his best friend back. He wanted to laugh and banter, make jokes about tuna melts. He wanted to know how Ed was doing, what he was thinking. He wanted anything to feel like this used to feel.

It won’t feel like that ever again, fine. But so far tonight, even with Ed’s obvious and justified frustration, Stede feels alert and alive, tingly down to his fingertips. He feels open-hearted and curious and smitten—all things so much bigger than shame. Things he would have killed to feel for even a second for all those years.

“It spurred me to get a divorce, too. But I don’t want to get into all of that,” he adds, interrupting Ed’s grumbling. “Like I said, it felt wrong not to mention it, so, there, I’ve mentioned it. Would you … would you tell me what the process was like? How you wrote it, how you sold it? Since I realized it was you, I’ve been dying to hear about it.”

“And when did that realization dawn,” Ed says, mote of cheek creeping into his tone, hallelujah, the clouds break.

“I think I knew at the beginning, I just wouldn’t let myself believe it.”

“Used to think about you reading it,” Ed says. “Took bets on when you’d figure it out.”

“You bet against yourself?”

“Sure but I also bet on myself.”

“Is that how that works?”

“I get the money either way,” Ed says.

“Yes, but you also have to pay it.”

“Okay, but—“

“Chippy’s,” Stede says. “When they got that job I was sure. Felt like. I dunno, like looking at my own life through a kaleidoscope.”

“They wanted me to cut that, said it didn’t add anything.”

“But you wove it through the whole book! The class anxiety and the shared trauma of it and the—the construction of the whole foundation for everyone’s friendship!”

“Yeah that came through in later revisions. I had a great editor, you wouldn’t believe how much better he made that f*ckin’ book. The original ending was different too. He convinced me to change it, and god he was right.”

“Oh really? What was the old ending?”

“Well, it had a lot more moving parts, and I had to really kill some f*ckin’ darlings, but…”

Ed talks and talks, and Stede listens. He listens harder than he’s ever listened in his life. He wants the words to seep through his clothes, down into his skin. He eats half his tuna melt and all of his fries. The plates are cleared and the waters are refilled and the server leaves them alone for a long time. The other tables clear out, and a group of very stoned twenty-somethings takes the big booth across the room and eat everything on the table including the garnishes. As they giggle, Ed says, okay, what are their names, what are their back stories, and Stede says, That one’s a musician, definitely. Ed says, dead right. Sings in a whisper, hates his mother, and Stede says, Absolutely, look at him, he laughs at everything the boys say and stares at his plate when the girls talk—he thinks he’s edgy, and Ed says, Edgy as a f*ckin’ pumpkin spice latte, and that’s how they wind up calling him Pumpkin Spice, that’s how they wind up naming his band and his three lead singles, that’s how they waste an hour sipping lukewarm beers and laughing, and that’s how they stumble into a soft damp street at three in the morning, and that’s how it ends, Ed saying he could use the walk, and Stede saying he could to, and then there is a beat, a precious, lingering beat, suspended in streetlight—

“You’re wearing the Minty’s uniform,” Ed says, eyes sweeping up and down.

Stede looks down at his body, blinks, laughs.

“Christ, you’re right.” White and teal striped shirt, black linen trousers that could be the pressed slacks of yore. “All I’m missing is the hat.”

Ed chuckles. Ed pulls him into a hug that hurts, a hug that exorcises his ghosts so fast it leaves him dizzy.

“Don’t run away again,” Ed says to the side of his head, and all Stede can do is nod.