Page 110 of The Corruption of Hollis Brown

This is a good thing. We’re a good thing.

Please don’t leave, please please.

What did you say, back then? When you were praying me away? When you were being a coward, running from me, and even still you couldn’t stop yourself from saying it. Begging for it.

What?

Tell me, Walt. I know you remember, because I can’t forget.

Walt shuddered, opened their eyes, glassy and wild.

As it was in the beginning—

Is now, and ever shall be . . .

Hollis shoved his hand into their jeans.

A world without end.

Yggdrasil

“We’re the same age, you know,” Hollis said, staring up at the blue sky.

I know.

Do you? Have you thought about it?

What do you mean?

Hollis closed their eyes and took a deep breath, smelled the salt and sweat on their skin, the sweet brown leaves and metallic winter, and tried to make Walt understand.

If you stay, we could grow up together, he said.

You can have your years slowly like everyone else. We can turn eighteen in a few weeks and learn what that’s like, turn nineteen the next year. We can move into our own house, be at work, come home, cook dinner, do the dishes, till the soil, and sleep in our own bed until we grow old. We can get married if you want, have children if you want. You can be a father; you can kiss our wife and know we earned her by ourselves and she loves you for you and me for me.

Or you can just have me. We’ll never be alone. We can be in our house and be strange and be loud and lasso a hurricane whenever we feel like.

We can lie in the hollow all weekend, and go to Rose Town without being scared. Swim in the pond. Eat from the trees. Find your door so we can admire it and know that we can open it whenever we want to.

Hollis—

We can leave if you want. Walk straight out of here and never come back. We can go to the city and learn a new trade, figure out how to be a man and be reliable. Be quiet in an apartment—I won’t let you make a sound. Muffle your wailing so the neighbors won’t hear. And we’ll get older, and time will pass, and I’ll never have the wrinkles I would have had on my own.

You’ll make your stupid expressions for decades, and they’ll dig into my face until it’s our face. Really ours.

And no one will know.

No one will know that I ever had green eyes when I was a stupid kid back in our stupid hometown, before we ever met.

Walt moaned, dug their fingers into the ground.

Walt, we can live, really live.

We’ll be a monster, Walt whispered, scared again.

Hollis was calm, waited for their heart to slow, waited for Walt’s anxiety to crest.

We’ll just be something new.