Page 32 of Dearly Departed

My clothes get tighter. That can’t be happening. I’m not growing out of them. I reached my adult height at twenty-one, and it took years after that to come to terms with the basis for my adult weight. Years. I’m not going back, and I’m not still growing, for fuck’s sake. I’m not.

“I’ve never managed to understand why you care, Dad.”

He shrugs. The handcuffs keep the gesture from its full range of motion. “You embarrass me. You embarrass your mother. You’re doing this all over again just to make fools of us in public.”

The button on my pants pops off and flies into a corner of the room.

“You’re such a sick fuck.”

“Who says?”

Bettencourt’s corpse has begun to expand, too, rotting in triple-time right there on the card table. Sam Newhouse plays another card. He brushes Bettencourt’s puffy hand out of the way distractedly. “Your turn, James.”

I’m not sure how I didn’t see James Hill when I first got here, because his burned body is unmissable. He has to be dead—nobody can be that burned and survive—but his blackened fingers twitch on a card at the edge of the table. Flakes of ash flutter down to the felt surface when he tries to pick one up. Bone, whiter than the cards, shows through the missing skin.

I’m going to be sick.

“Best if you don’t,” Newhouse mentions. “Hill, was that your move?”

I turn my back on all of them and go out into the hallway.

It’s not the hallway I expected. It’s the hallway at the private school Gabriel and I attended before his parents died and I let him suffer for years. Light streams in on dark, polished hardwood. Dust motes sparkle lazily in the air. I’m stuffed to the gills, and if my clothes get any tighter, they’ll cut through my skin and maybe through my bones. I don’t know what it’s called when a person dies from being hacked to death by his own school uniform. It was tailored to fit. This shouldn’t be happening.

I know where the restroom is on this floor, but every door I try leads into a teacher’s lounge or an art studio or the closet where they store the basketballs in the gym. It smelled like old rubber and industrial cleaning products, but during the stretches when nobody had class, I could kiss my boyfriend uninterrupted for half an hour or forty-five minutes at a time. I could kiss him until he went weak in the knees, then do whatever else he wanted. Anything else he wanted. And when I stood up again and his eyes were all dark and his cheeks were all pink and he couldn’t string a full sentence together, I was perfect.

For a little while.

I find the bathroom at the last possible moment, my stomach clenched around the food I’d eaten for lunch, calorically calibrated to appear healthful and nourishing by the woman my mother hired for the purpose. I couldn’t remember her name to save my life. She packed those lunches in a bento box that fit alongside an ice pack in its container. It was always cold when I opened it at the table, my jacket slung over the chair behind me. It was always perfect. Every time.

It’s been in my stomach less than twenty minutes when I heave all of it up and flush it away. There. There. My clothes aren’t so awful anymore.

What they are is loose. Too loose. The air conditioning kicks on and blows a stiff, icy breeze down the length of my spine. I pull my jacket tighter around my body, but the cold keeps coming.

“Jacob?” The soft creak of the bathroom door swinging open reaches me after the voice, which is wrong, but then everything about this situation seems wrong, so maybe it’s good that the door is consistent. “Are you okay?”

“Of course I’m okay, handsome.” I wipe my mouth on my sleeve, put a smile on, and leave the stall.

The smile drops off his face the second his eyes meet mine. “Jacob?”

“What?”

“What happened?” He comes closer and touches my face. His pupils—swimming in green, a gorgeous shade of green—aren’t blown with pleasure. They’re terrified pinpricks. “Tell me what happened.”

I pull away from his hand, though I don’t want to, and look in the mirror.

Blood trickles down from my forehead, slicing across my nose in a thin, dark line. As I watch, deep shadows bruise my undereyes and spread like spilled oil. My eyes are bloodshot, the red standing out against the blue. That would happen, on occasion. That happens? I suppose it’s still happening. Burst blood vessels. A raw pain in my throat.

“I’m just tired.” I turn back to Gabriel with a smile shellacked in place.

He’s gone.

Catherine stands in the middle of the restroom, staring up at me with wide, horrified eyes. “The man’s eyes were down here. And on an angle. Like the guy was bent over. And they were too big to be a normal person’s eyes. They were like an animal’s, but…too round. Too white. They were too white, Jacob. He couldn’t have been real. But he was. And then I saw his arm.”

Kitten, I want to say. That was a long time ago. I’m sure it was a long time ago.

No words come out of my mouth. Nothing works.

Catherine’s eyes get wider. “Like that.” She points at my left arm, her hand trembling. “His arm was hanging down just like that.”